The ceiling had been leaking since way before the curfew began. No, though some claim so, it wasn’t the curfew that caused the leak. It only exposed the cracks that hid ingeniously in-between the going-out and coming-in of our everyday routine. Now that we remain indoors all the time, all the tenants are ceaselessly fighting among themselves.

‘It is your unbearable weight that is causing the leaks! One tiny room and the six of you! Big fat ones too! Of course these fragile floors will give up! You are saving up on rent and consuming it all away in meat. Then you go about walking and thumping in your house like the bunch of elephants you are. Stop eating so much food, you filth, you! You are a burden to this forsaken world,’ said Chandra Mohan—or was his name Pawan Charan? I forget. Anyway, this perennially agitated elderly gentleman, who was also a self-proclaimed practising Jain (though his practice wasn’t as pure as he liked to think) yelled outside the Dasgupta family room so that everyone in this Building could hear his contrived wrath. He thought this would be construed as the blowing of the conch-shell before battle. This happened maybe a few weeks ago, or was it last decade? No way to be certain. But the Jain man Chandra Mohan—or Pawan Charan was right in that it indeed sparked off a series of smaller battles. People who didn’t have the courage to yell earlier now suddenly found some inspiration through the Jain’s violent demeanour. There was this middle-aged lady, let us call her Kamla, who went on a yelling fit against her neighborhood ‘saheli’ Vidya for blocking the only small alley window in their floor with her flower vases which obstructed the airflow of the entire Building and was therefore deemed ‘definitively responsible for the leaks.’ Of course, this Vidya woman (who, let us mention on a side-note, was among the more amiable and friendly characters in the Building—loved by all kids, especially prepubescent boys) fought back at Kamla in such a raging, animated, even comical manner that a few other women became convinced that Vidya was slowly getting possessed by a demon that was rising through the Building’s gutters. 

Clean water or not, rumours are in constant circulation in our Building. This demon that was apparently possessing Vidya was the form of a headless serpent crossed with an oceanic turtle. A few children swore they had seen this particular demon in broad daylight poking out of the toilet-hole among yesteryear’s fecal matter and the arsenic-like liquid that leaks from the ceilings of all our rooms. One child even claimed that this serpent had bit his testicles, twisting them out of shape, and due to this twisted fate some kind of abhorrent white liquid came oozing out of his penis: milk, which the said demon wanted to drink—but we know how wild the teenage imagination can be! Ever since this incident, however, this Christian child, who we shall call Peter, became extremely devout, sitting for endless hours in prayer as though gripped by an otherworldly force, isolating away from all his friends because he believed that foulness of the mouth was a sure path to hell. No one saw Peter for a very long time. Some say he got so absorbed in the Holy Spirit that he abandoned his body and astral-travelled to a secret hidden spot in the Building. The kid group, which was shrinking day by day due to inexplicable and sudden deaths, initiated an expedition to try and find the spirit of Peter, and on weekends—well, even on weekdays because time here means absolutely nothing—the children set-out in two groups to look for all possible secret pathways across the Building confines. The children found some curious things but they didn’t know what to make of them. 

One of their interesting discoveries was a worn-out bullet-shell, which Sohini, the twelve year old Sikh girl who found it, thought was a seed-pod. An old—no, ancient, primitive, peon in our Building, who happened to be the personal tea-deliverer of the illustrious historian Mr. Qazi, claimed that this bullet belonged to an ‘era when the Queen of our Kingdom declared open war against the people and the people had to hide in secret cabinets of others who were in better favours with the powers-that-be.’ He claimed that there were sirens in the night-sky and books were banned, as were social gatherings, ‘and the soldiers roamed free in the streets with rifles hanging by their shoulders, and you could be shot dead on sight if you wore a certain type of clothes, like Sohini’s mother’s, or if you decided to speak up what you actually thought, or if the local police superintendent of one’s district developed a special taste for the sisters and daughters of a family. . .’ The primitive peon kept mentioning one detail after another (all I do not bother to remember) and scared the children away. 

Other more respectable peoples of our Building, such as the now-out-of-work Physical Education teacher Vinay (who looked more like a movie star than a school-teacher) claimed that this bullet-shell was indeed from last month’s firing spree done by the Government discretely, and that it cased not gunpowder but a capsule carrying a Virus that was causing all the leaks in our Building. This made some sense to a few young men and women and they decided that it was high-time ‘we quit fighting among ourselves and come together to fight whoever else is causing all these leaks. How can we sleep with this repugnant liquid oozing out of our walls, dripping on our food and water, causing fungal matter to grow everywhere we step!’ They started meeting in a room rented by the rapper MC Tehzaab—who wrote slogans and rhymes for the group and kept them motivated by his “bars”. The group made protest posters and pasted them on our Building walls to cover a few leaks and to educate and agitate the other tenants, but soon the posters dripped wet and flaked off and the ink washed away without a trace. 

In search of Peter’s lost spirit, the children found a few other artifacts worth remembering, or not worth remembering, it doesn’t matter. There was a glass-jar that had a strand of hair enclosed in it, which captured the fantasy of Raja the middle-aged taxi driver to such an extent that he extorted this glass-jar from the children and placed it on his little prayer-temple barely hanging on by the wall of his flooding room. Raja started claiming that this strand of hair belonged to his old lover from a previous birth, and that he had been searching for it, unknowingly, his entire life. Now that he had found it he no longer cared for anything else, and that ‘now I know I have the strength to bear any calamity, this curfew, this ceaseless leaking, the clogging gutters, the stench!—what-so-ever it is! I have found what I had been searching for, and my Beloved has shown me the way! The way is that there is no way! There is nowhere to go to and nowhere to come back. All battles are pointless because all paths lead to the beloved, oh, to my own beloved…’ he used to say in a sing-song manner. Sometimes people would see him dancing and swirling in ecstasy while the poisonous liquid dripped from his room’s ceiling endlessly. He started claiming that he hears a secret rhythm in the falling of the drops from the ceiling above, drops which he likened to the tears of his beloved. ‘But do not be mistaken, my friends, these are tears of joy! These are tears of a final and complete surrender!’ He often used to proclaim. His strange condition affected a few tenants so profoundly that they began following him and worshipping this strand of hair—which they started calling by the name Maya. Every few centuries they would come together on a full-moon-night and dance ecstatically in front of their all-exalted strand of hair. It was quite a habit. 

Among all of this, the children found the remains of a dead beetle clinging on to a round mound of dung; a pair of gloves that no matter how much anyone tried could not be worn, just wouldn’t fit; a clay-tablet with inscriptions in a language none of us could decipher; skeleton of an odd rodent that caused a lot of stir by its discovery, don’t ask why; and some kind of glowing stone, which for a weird reason caught no one’s attention and was left neglected. The search stopped all of a sudden when one night Peter emerged from his hiding place, cleansed off of his sin, and yelled profanities so loud it shook the entire Building. I remember it leaked particularly violently that night. Perhaps it was precisely that night, or the night before, maybe many nights after, that the curfew began. It has been impossible to keep track of the nights and days since the curfew. Time has become a blur, and memory no longer serves. All I remember is the curfew’s horrifying abruptness. It happened just like that, a snap, done, and before anyone could make sense of what was going on we were in the middle of it. One of our certain politically-minded neighbours, the educated but unemployed maverick Mr. Satish, believes that the curfew began because slowly but surely we were coming together, our tenants were uniting and uprising against the leaks, and because the Building authority—all Building authorities all over the world—sensed this coming together they imposed the curfew on us, and now we are isolated from each other, and because of this isolation we are losing our minds, even forgetting what it means to be a tenant in a Building, and now we are just quibbling and quarrelling among ourselves like animals. We are no longer seeing each other’s faces, or hearing other’s voices. Most of us just stay locked-in, and the few that try to come out find that a certain indescribable illness has taken over them. It is hard to put into words, but the symptoms are common: a shortness of breath, where even inhaling and exhaling feel like a chore, a loss of appetite, followed by an impulsive urge to consume non-food items (most common is a strange desire to gobble up plastic), a persistent ache throughout the body, a compulsive need to stare at oneself in the mirror for long hours, and a complete inability to form a real connection with one’s neighbours. 

Every once in a while there’s news of death in the Building. The causes and circumstances of these deaths are quite unclear. There is the horrific tale of Anandi Kumari, a maid who once served other prosperous Buildings by doing domestic labour in the rooms of adults that mindlessly practiced the delegation of basic existential chores in favour of social conformity. Anandi Kumari was found dead, perhaps a few days back, with a soapy foam seeping out of all the orifices of her body. Then there was the tailor Asif Ali whose rotting body was found with innumerable holes, crevices that went deep to the bone, spread all around from head to toe. There are a few instances of self-inflicted deaths as well, but the details are too morose to recount. One by one we are all falling down. Perhaps it is in the anticipation of a certain death, faced with the realization that one’s life is no more than insignificant collateral damage, that I am setting the story of our Building to words, to memory in the face of indifference, forgetfulness. 

But soon the final forgetfulness will consume these frittering, ambiguous memories away. Then there will be the unconscious spinning and nausea of our remnant lives. The ones that survive will survive solely to fill the spaces in our leaking rooms. One after another the tenants will be replaced. There will be no such thing as your room, my room, even our room; just rooms. For rent. Some of our tenants may even find some semblance of happiness and contentment in their lives, as life is never bound by a single dimension. Some will fall in love again, others will fall out of its favour. There will be bickering as usual, but there may even be some friendship once more. A bit of hope will come once again to the young. A slight gracefulness will be found in the remains of old-age. A last drop will flood my room completely, after which it will become impossible for another tenant to stay here. But I will be far gone then, still glad to have come despite it all, glad to have left because of it.

…

Kokum Mukul is a writer and lifelong autodidact based in the limbo between cities and villages across North India. Mukul is deeply interested in the intersection of worlds and cultures and how it shapes our human condition. He loves dried apricots, long walks, arduous treks, and the act of doing nothing.