It looked like there’s been a volcanic eruption at the dining table. Grains of rice lay scattered along the surface like little islands, with a trail of tomato curry leading up to the plate of rajma chawal.
“Why must I always eat last?” complained Romi, the eldest, as she liked to call herself, as Amma gestured to the meal.
“You’re not eating last. Look, I’m still feeding the baby.”
“But the baby’s never finished. You’re always feeding the baby.”
This was true. Ever since they had shifted to Bombay Below, the baby’s appetite had been insatiable. And worse, the baby ate so slowly that you could hardly tell it was chewing. It was only when a big bowl of dahi was over after a couple of hours, that you could ascertain that some progress had been made. But the moment the dahi looked like it was about to finish, the baby would start wailing again, and thrashing as if it wanted more.
“Your Papa has had to go to his office na, baby, and you know he’s always running late for the shuttle.”
Romi groaned.
Romi was not a fan of being babied, or of the baby itself.
Romi did not trust its oversized head and enormous eyes. The baby always looked like it was plotting something, but amma and Papa simply wouldn’t admit it. And it would just hold food in its tiny little mouth, decomposing it like some sort of garbage processor. So pretentious. Romi hated being clubbed with a human football, but here she was again, being made to share space with her younger sibling as some sort of cosmic punishment for past evils.
“So ugly” Romi whispered under her breath as she took a chair, and as if on cue, the baby resumed its wailing.
Arti didi arrived with a plate of rice for Romi and a bowl of dahi to refill the baby’s meal.
Amma watched, as Romi took a little bit of the rajma and poured it into a well at the centre of her rice. When Amma was watching, Romi knew to be extra careful. To eat without spilling anything. To avoid looking at the circles under amma’s eyes.
Romi ate in silence, feet dangling from her chair, as she stared out of the window at the seaweed and the kelp. This had seemed so appealing before they’d moved. but now Romi felt like a goldfish, trapped inside an aquarium. But there was no use complaining about life at this juncture. Her parents may be living well for waterlanders, but they definitely didn’t have the money to shift back to the big city and return to the mainland. Even she knew that. Amma made it a point to tell her. And they wouldn’t know what might happen if they did.
“Especially with the baby…”
After a waterbirth, it wasn’t certain what would happen to babies that had never been on land. There was no research on the long term effects of being waterborne. Romi sometimes hoped the baby’s head would explode if they set it on dry land, but she wished it only half heartedly. She didn’t want Amma to be sad.
Before the baby, Romi and Amma had been best friends. Then the stupid baby came along and ruined everything, and Papa had to start staying out more, and Amma became, well, the way she was now.
Papa wasn’t here and he’d asked Romi to give her mother company and be good, but the baby hadn’t made things any more fun for Romi.
Romi wished she didn’t have to be alone with Amma all the time. She thought the water had gone to her head. On her happier days, Amma shone bright. But of late, Amma had been fading, like dying coral. And Papa had to travel farther for work.. When he was around, it was as if Amma had bloomed again.
But today was the day he’d had to leave, so Romi knew to be extra careful. Amma cooed to the baby as she fed it some more. She then turned to Romi.
“Stop daydreaming, start eating.”
Romi wanted to tell Amma she wasn’t daydreaming, but her mouth was full. And Romi knew it was pointless to argue with Amma. Not in front of the baby.
Sometimes Romi wondered whether her mother did anything except talk to the baby. It was all anyone in her family seemed to care about of late.
When her grandmother came, she looked at the baby with pride, held it, and wouldn’t stop playing with it. Romi was tasked with bringing things to people when they asked for them. A toy for the baby. The bottle for the baby. The baby’s bag, which contained the baby’s things. The baby was tiny, but it took over Romi’s life and cast a shadow over it.
Romi felt herself darken in the eclipse, staring into the windows and watching the cracks in the ceiling.
As she shoveled the rajma into her mouth, she felt like her brain was a dysfunctional washing machine, and the baby had pressed the buttons that dumped all her memories into the basket and started the long rinse cycle.
She had to get out of here. But there was nowhere to go. Only the sea, deep and brown and salty. There was also school, but that was its own kind of imprisonment. So she put away her plate and went back to her room. It was small, but it seemed expansive, because it was the only place that the baby hadn’t yet invaded. Starfished on the bed, Romi envisioned what her life would be like if she could just make it out, out of this little house, out of this tiny space, and out to the city above.
For starters, it wouldn’t be so silent. There would be so much sound it might make her head hurt. And sunlight! It had been three years since they’d moved to Bombay Below, and they’d hardly seen any sunshine in those years. Romi imagined staring at the clouds and standing still like a sunflower.
Romi didn’t like thinking about the move, but she couldn’t stop herself. Romi did not know why she kept thinking of how things were before. She felt like she was peering into a bookcase, unable to pull out any of the books, but incapable of looking away. The memories would come to her haphazardly, middles before beginnings, and without an end in sight.
They’d not been told where they’d be moving, but she had seen Amma with magazines which had photos of aquarium-like houses with glass walled living rooms, sunlight streaming in through pristine blue waters, with turtles outside the window.
The fliers had the most cliche lines on them. “Tired of the Traffic, Hate the Heat? Move to Bombay Below”. Amma had a bunch of those. Some of those magazines seemed older than Romi, and Amma would always keep them safely inside her trunk whenever she was done reading them. This was back when they were best friends, of course, and did things together.
Romi sighed.
In the beginning, all everyone could talk about was Bombay Below. At school. On TV. In the children’s magazines. Even Champak carried a feature on underwater life when the news of the new city came out. It had been touted as the new thing in architecture. The uber smart residence created after the cyclone and the unseasonable rain, inspired by that restaurant in Dubai where you could dine with the fishes. All the pictures showed the endless blue. It was all anyone could talk about. How the engineers had done such a great job to build and rebuild the city so it was flood-proof. “It can’t flood if it’s underwater” the chief builder had said, “and it’s safer that way— we’ll make sure all our construction is top quality and that it’s all naturally powered. We’ll harness the energy of the earth and the sea and the wind so we can live a safer life.”
He’d come to TV and talk, as if he was an environmental evangelist. “Don’t build less, build better.”
And they were selling the first few houses at throwaway rates! Amma and Papa would stay up watching TV while Romi slept, having long, quiet discussions. Sometimes, half asleep, Romi would hear them say her name- with words like “adjustment issues”, and ‘distance’ and ‘isolation’. Romi didn’t know enough words then to know what they meant.
Then Amma and Papa began to think about having a baby, and suddenly, Amma’s eyes began to look more dreamy as she held those little magazines. And Papa decided he’d pool all his savings from all the jobs he’d ever done and give their family a better life. They’d stop renting that tiny apartment in the bowels of the city, and move to a better life in Bombay Below.
That was before.
The trouble began when they got here the first time, a year after Papa had already paid the advance on their plot. The shifting seascape and the freak weather events had made some changes to the geography, and the lovely living community in the sea would now be a low income housing complex. It would be sheltered by a huge protective underwater wall because of stricter safety norms. There would be a shuttle to the city every hour, and there would be some shops in the complex, but not much else. It wasn’t what was advertised, but It was too late at this point, for Papa to opt out of the agreement. Everyone knew the city was going to sink, and scarcity was pushing the prices of the land even higher than the skyscrapers on it.
So they moved anyway, and Papa figured out a way to make it work. He’d say he was happy to finally own a home, but when he came home, somehow, he’d seem a little deflated.
Romi hated seeing her father like that, but it had seemed like things would change once the baby arrived. For a while, everyone was happier. Even her. The baby had seemed normal enough in the beginning. Papa got leave from the office to help Amma with the baby. He called Romi his second in command, and made funny faces to make her laugh when they’d get tired. They cooked for Amma together, and he’d tell Romi how important it was that she take care of Amma and the baby.
But then Papa’s office resumed and his hours grew longer. The bags under Amma’s eyes increased. Amma grew more irritable.
Romi knew she was supposed to take care of Amma while he was away but her little legs hurt from walking on eggshells around Amma, from not knowing when what was needed. Amma stopped asking Romi for help, and began to do things herself, muttering angrily.
Romi tried to be careful not to get in her way, but every now and then, she’d get the wrong bottle, or forget to turn the geyser off, and Amma would grab her ear and twist until her eyes watered and Romi didn’t have any words to say except a “sorry” that amma never really believed.
The baby watched and ate, while Romi grew taller and more tired each day, unsure of what was coming.
This is why she needed to get away. To keep herself away from Amma, who had been driven crazy by the baby. And to stop the baby from driving her crazy as well. Everything was so good before it had come. She let out a soft sob.
But she couldn’t just get up and leave so easily. She’d be like Oliver Twist if she ran away from home like that , and she wasn’t sure she’d manage. Maybe she didn’t need to leave forever. She could go out for a little while and then come back, and nobody would need to know what had happened, because they’d be too busy thinking about the baby anyway. Arti didi might notice, but nobody really listened to Arti didi, and it would be easy to slip out while she was otherwise occupied.
All Romi needed now was a plan.
So she took out her notebook, and began making a list of all she’d need when she left. Her wetclothes, a book, a sandwich; shoes, socks, the pocket money she’d saved for the past four years. Armed with all of these things, she felt prepared to board a shuttle as soon as it arrived.
The next one was in about half an hour. Then she would be up and away.
Romi squared her shoulders, and smiled. It was possible for the plan to fail, but she needed to believe it would succeed. She took her backpack, with all that she could fit into it and began to edge her way to the corner of the house where nobody would see her.
Even she could tell she looked suspicious.
She dropped her bag near the door and then walked back out to where Amma was still feeding the baby. She shook her head. “Still suspicious”, she whispered to herself.
Luckily, Amma was busy trying to make the baby believe her spoon was an aeroplane, and did not have time to suspect Romi of anything, or to listen to her whispers.
The baby watched Romi dither, unblinking.
When Arti didi came out again, Romi followed her into the kitchen. She offered Romi some milk. Romi sipped it quietly, counting each second as she wasted it. She had only twenty minutes left, and leaving was harder than she’d expected it to be.
Then the baby wailed again, and Arti didi rushed out to the living room with a bottle. Romi saw her chance, and dashed to the exit before anyone could see her.
The exit wasn’t straightforward, and it took some doing to get into her wetsuit and out of the house while the baby screamed. Each house in Bombay Below needed to have 2 exits, one dry, and another room beyond it, which allowed the water to come in while the residents moved in or out in their wetsuits. Once out, Romi had to push a valve to drain the water that had rushed in as she had left, and to switch her oxygen mask on before she walked on the seabed to the shuttle stop. It was exhausting. Romi took a deep breath and stepped beyond the threshold. Her breath smelt like milk. Not reassuring at all.
Each time she stepped out of home, Romi felt a little bit like an astronaut. A small, inefficient one, but an astronaut nonetheless. As she arrived at the bus stop, it struck Romi that she’d not made up her mind about where she would go next. She had enough money for the shuttle, but she needed to be careful how she spent it so she could comfortably make her way home.
She’d not had much time to plan, and having crossed the biggest hurdle on her path, she was beginning to realize that she was, in fact, on her own. She had no friends, real, or imaginary, to share this experience with. She was the only one she could trust right now, and she needed to stop being scared.
She stared at the bus stop, hoping it would give her ideas. There wasn’t much to inspire, save for a dilapidated poster behind the bench, advertising the shuttle service. “Ride a rollercoaster of a current, and exit elsewhere.” There were still a few minutes for the bus to arrive, so she sat down with her backpack in her lap, and waited.
The bus stop did not echo the forced cheeriness of the sign. The waiting area was the entrance to an undersea tunnel, and the blue walls had started to look a little artificial with all the paintings of fish and blue ocean. There were brief moments of coasting on the currents, but the long distance travel, or even the medium ones, were underground. Romi realized as she contemplated the construction of the complex, that perhaps all advertising was false. And it was possible that all adults did was lie to each other, and themselves. Why else would they sell a dream so far away from reality? A dream like Bombay Below, or the baby, which had sounded much more fun in theory than it was in practice. Already, in just the first phase of her exploration, she had the feeling that she had learnt an important lesson much faster than some of the adults in her world.
As she looked around alone for the first time, everything about the architecture of the bus stop seemed enhanced. Romi paid attention to the minutest of details, kept an ear out for the faintest of sounds. Looking for something to tether her attention to, she looked at the pipes pumping constantly, making little whirlpools on the seabed where the air was pumped in. At the place where the blue gray concrete met the sand, and the seashells collected.
Romi used to come here with her father when she was younger, but it had been a while since she’d been here all by herself. When she was younger, she would call the whirlpools “baby storms”, and count the times they’d spin in a minute. If the result was odd, her father had told her, one of her wishes would come true. If not, tough luck. She had never wished so hard for an odd number until today. And yet, while she was here, the entire prospect of escape was losing its lustre. Romi wished she could close her eyes and just end up at a better time. But she knew better than to believe in magic. So she took out her notebook and began to plan what she would do once she got on the bus.
Hide from passengers that might inform her parents of her whereabouts
Get something to eat ( she already been nibbling on her sandwich while she made the list)
– Visit the library
– Read for some time
– Walk across the Bombay bridge
Romi felt better having made her list, but she had to stop at point 6, because the shuttle had arrived. She packed her things and stood up to enter it. The shuttle was a whale shaped underwater bus, with kelp painted on the sides, and sliding doors that let her in to sit on its shiny seats. There was no conductor, and each seat had a digital menu of destinations that the passengers could click for the shuttle driver to see.
The bus was empty except for some old ladies knitting in the first two seats. Romi went and sat behind them. She wondered where the ladies would get off— they didn’t seem like the type who’d want to go to the city above, with their gray hair and slow movements. Romi knew it wasn’t polite to say it out loud, but they looked like they’d pass away before they made it through half the city. But the shuttle stopped at just four places– and apart from the residential suburb of Bombay Below, the route only mentioned the Clinical Emergencies wing, the Library and the Port. Perhaps they were headed to the hospital.
Romi was proved right when the lady ahead of her broke out into a violent bout of coughing. While the woman rattled, her companion patted her back, looking concerned. They were both so old, and so frail. Something about their tender exchange reminded her of how Amma patted the baby. She was jealous of its fragility, and the concern with which everyone handled it. She felt ashamed, for a moment, about being so utterly selfish. She who could recite the names of at least 5 types of penguins, was jealous of a hideous crying blob? For what? The affections of her thankless parents who forgot her the moment the ugly baby batted its eyes at them.? Forget it. Even now, so far away from home, the baby still loomed large in her brain with its wickedness. She wouldn’t give in. She decided there was nothing about the two old women that was like her own family. She was far away from them, and determined to go further.
She tapped the menu on her seat and selected the library. The shuttle stopped to let the two women off at the tunnel that led to the hospitals. Romi watched them take their walkers to an assistant who carried a tank of emergency oxygen, and as the shuttle sped past them, all three became a blip in the endless silence beneath the sea. After a few minutes of darkness, the shuttle finally emerged from the tunnel and was pushed again into the bobbing unsteadiness of the waterways. Out of the windows, Romi could see the sharp lines of light coming into the ocean, and occasionally, a starfish would stick to the window. She could see the underside of boats on the sea’s surface, and the fishing nets spread like spiderwebs in the water. As she crossed over to the edges of Bombay Below, she began to feel a renewed sense of anticipation.
Romi had picked the library because it was the most affordable option of the four, and it was one of the few places in bombay below that connected to the city above. It hadn’t been built that way a century ago, but it had gone under after a particularly warm global summer . There was something fossil-like about the place. Romi remembered her mother comparing it to a ghost town. It was a church, initially, but when the beach came up a few years ago after the relentless rain, its halls had been flooded and everything holy about it had either been buried in sand or become sea debris. But while the pews had disintegrated, the heavy stone walls and the reinforced iron columns had withstood the rise, and since the large doors of the building had been destroyed, its high ceilings made it an ideal shuttle stop.
So the ground floor became a shuttle stop, and the first, a buffer zone, with the second being a “library”, although it was actually more of a reading room and a sanctuary, a sunlit refuge sticking out from the sea. Romi didn’t remember it sinking. Sje only remembered it being beautiful. She got off the shuttle like an astronaut walking to the moon. Every step felt big. Momentous. She could go up now. She was free. She walked up the stairway to the place where the books were, and then she changed her mind. She walked over to the third floor, and gingerly looked at the giant iron bridge connecting the church to the old building.
There it was, the city above. With waves that crashed loudly against the walls and the skyscrapers so tall Romi had to crane her neck to see them. There were people walking across the bridge, children with their parents, people holding hands, people eating, drinking, talking, singing, screaming. There was nothing in between them when they looked at each other.
Romi removed her wetsuit, and stretched her arms out to the warmth of the evening sun. With every layer she shed, it felt like she was peeling off old dead skin. The sea spray was close enough to moisten her helmet. She’d forgotten to take it off. As she removed it, the waves below were loud and terrifying. Her problems seemed smaller, somehow, when she looked at them from this dizzying height. She’d figure them out later, if she needed to. She’d come so far on her own, hadn’t she? Romi took a deep breath and watched the clouds. Maybe in a while she’d go and buy a sandwich. It felt good to come out of the fishbowl for a while. It was nice to finally breathe.