After Annihilation - Would you want to survive?

Chapter 9

We started with the first planting after two months of being in the city. Half of June had passed. Every morning, I would get out of bed by telling myself the bodies with the unrecognizable faces I had seen at my apartment did not belong to my parents. That there was still a chance I would get to see them. We hadn't heard about any of our friends in Sikka. I would think about Divya, Sonakshi, and Dhruv sometimes and wonder if they too had miraculously survived. We had stopped talking about our miseries, having locked them inside of us. The city boasted a population of three thousand by now. Many had been saved by the hospital by using the experimental drug.

In the evenings, I would generally go over to the 2nd Street or to the hospital to spend time with Geetika. Times of hardship had made us closer more rapidly than times of comfort would have. Sometimes I would hang out with Ananya in her room, asking her to teach me to sing, but her efforts were all in vain.

We were all going through a difficult time. The prime minister had still not recovered, and the army general was in charge of the city. His posters adorned the cafeteria, the announcement hall, and the military headquarters.

The general kept making rules that were difficult to follow. He issued an order that everyone had to be out of their cabins in the morning and contribute in one of the prescribed jobs. There were people who were old and physically unwell. The hospital did not consider their state as needing admission but, they needed rest in their cabins. These people leaned on younger or healthier people for sharing coupons. They would care for the kids in exchange, while the other people worked.

He forbade people from going out to the lake at the city entrance after the lights had been switched off at ten at night. Going to the lake used to give people solace and some presence of nature. The lake was the place where the lights were always on, and many people, including me and my friends, liked to stroll or sit on the bank and talk late into the night. It had helped people bond and get acquainted with others during their first two months in the city. The general's orders were not only impractical, they were also autocratic.

But no one could say a word against the general within earshot of a patrol guard or a civilian snitch.

A month after I started working on the farm, I tried to go to the end of 3rd Street to have a look at the cave entrance that Vishwaroopum had told me about, but so far I hadn't had the chance to get near it, since there was always a guard with a rifle posted at the end. As soon as anyone tried to go near, he would become alert, move forward ten feet, and demand a permission letter to be shown to be present in the area, but no one wondered about the reason because no one other than me or occasionally young children bothered to come this far out on 3rd Street. The area was not well lit, and there seemed to be nothing there. I had told Aarav about the cave after Vishwaroopum's permission and sometimes, he too would stroll near it.

One day, during an impromptu visit to the area, the guard stationed there was absent.

When I was certain the guard was not somewhere in the vicinity, I went closer to the rock and touched it. It was colder to the touch than in other places. I knew the reason. Unlike at the other ends, here it was hollow on the other side. One of the rocks in this wall was artificial and was the entrance into a path that led to a cave at the surface and a different world than the one we were trapped in. One that had been kept hidden until it recovered enough to be able to bear an onslaught of human beings.

I stood by the wall, my hand on its rough surface, my eyes closed and head leaning on it. I imagined what lay behind. In my mind's eye, I pictured the sun, blazing hot and spreading light in all directions. The sound of the birds chirping. Of trees, their leaves swishing lightly in the air, the sky glistening blue and the serene sound of constantly flowing blue water, moving on and on, the sounds and the sights of nature, an amalgamation which now lay only in the experiences of my imagination.