Portrait of a City on the Brink of Destruction

“Ice On The New River, No. 6 (2022)” by Benjamin Erlandson

On the night before the world is supposed to end -

How will it end, you ask? Is it war, an inconveniently timed asteroid, global warming, alien invaders? It doesn’t matter. There’s always something. Pick your appropriately dramatic poison and we’ll go with that.

The why is unimportant. It’s the who that we’re interested in.

So: on the eve of the world’s untimely end, we find ourselves in a city perched on the edge of the sea: the beginning and end of all things. I won’t tell you its name. It could be any city. It could be your city. But for the purposes of our story, it’s my city.

Salt-drenched air. An endless maze of crisscrossing roads, painted by the twin streams of car headlights. Thousands of air conditioners humming in unison. The monstrous swollen belly of a water tanker trundling along the highway. The lamplight glow of a stray cat’s eyes. Impressions, like Van Gogh furiously working at a canvas trying to capture the improper beauty of the night sky, a beauty too nebulous for clean lines and defined shapes. 

Such are the memories of the city of my birth. I hear it now: the city inhales, a breath full of salt, and exhales dust. Like its people, it is tired.

But tonight, we have little time to explore the city. So let us focus, instead, on a party. There are many of them happening all over the city - weddings, anniversaries, birthday celebrations. End of the world parties, though the revellers dare not call them that.

This one will do: here is a private members’ club, a recreational boating club on the seaside, a relic from a colonial past whose wounds still leave their marks on this battered nation and this proud city. You can tell, can’t you? The panelled wooden walls and rich leather of the sofas could have been transplanted from a hunting lodge on some wealthy earl’s estate. The sad eyes of a decapitated stag gaze down, lit by the glow of an elaborate chandelier.

The guests, too, evoke the dress and manners of their previous rulers, but they embrace these with the foppish, irreverent delight of newfound freedom. The men wear their suits with the aggressiveness of armour; here and there a tie is rakishly loosened, or a printed scarf flung across a shoulder. The women are wrapped in sequins and silks that highlight the suppleness of curves and the gleam of a freshly waxed leg.

But disregard them. We begin, instead, with Rashid, who pours drinks behind the bar. The bar is an elaborate affair: gleaming wood, and a glass cabinet displaying a dizzying array of bottles. Rashid is also an elaborate affair: he is dressed in the uniform of the club’s employees, a white naval uniform, though he’s never even set foot on a boat. 

He has also never touched a drop of alcohol in his life, but he mixes drinks with the effortless artistry of a Michelin star waiter or a trendy New York City bartender, tossing a slice of lemon into a gin and tonic and in the same fluid movement grabbing a bottle of red wine and pouring it in a gleaming arc so fluidly that none of it splashes over the edges of the gleaming glass.

The woman he serves the wine to is charmed. Pointed, acid green nails scrap against the wine glass as she accepts it. “So funny to see a man with a beard like that working as a bartender,” she says to her friend.

“It’s cute,” counters the friend, whose hair is dyed an abrasive shade of red. They are both young, both actresses, both the daughters of wealthy fathers and ambitious mothers, a dangerous combination. 

Rashid pretends not to hear this, though he suddenly feels self-conscious about his beard, which is too long to be fashionable but too short to be a marker of religious devotion. In truth, he has not been to the mosque to pray since his wife’s death. His prayers are a quiet, private affair, embellished not by hope but by resignation, driven by necessity rather than desire. This job, too, is a product of necessity, and he is too old and comfortable in it to judge the habits of his customers. 

Not observant but an observer, he watches as the two women are joined by a man holding an empty glass, which he taps impatiently on the bar, as a signal for Rashid to refill it. 

“You must know what’s going on,” the actress with the green nails says to him.

The man, who has lost his suit jacket somewhere over the course of the night and is swaying dangerously - Rashid discreetly waters down his whiskey - looks startled, and then remembers that his father is the chief minister and so people expect him to know things. He is neither handsome nor charming nor well-spoken, but knowledge is the golden ticket that allows him entry to these exclusive parties. 

He lights a cigarette to bide time. The room is rich with clouds of cigarette smoke, and embers gleam in the ashtrays dotted across exquisitely carved wooden tables. 

The minister’s son exhales, and smoke casts a veil over the woman’s face. 

“It’s probably not going to happen anytime soon,” he says. “They have to give people advance warning, so we can make plans to get out.”

“But not everyone can leave the country,” says the red-haired actress.

The minister’s son shrugs as if to say, well, that’s tragic but unavoidable, isn’t it?

Further down the bar, a journalist in a smart pantsuit snorts as Rashid hands her a vodka soda, and addresses the group around her. “What an idiot. Where are people supposed to run away to? And how is the government supposed to give anybody advance warning when nobody knows what the hell is going on?”

“You journos definitely do,” says the man to her right, a budding poet with more time than talent, who wears a colourful scarf that announces that he doesn’t care about fashion trends and a flat cap that announces that he considers himself working class. “Is it true they’ve been sending security agents to all the big news channels and threatening them not to broadcast any new information?”

The journalist laughs, half flirting and half mocking and above all easily deflecting the question. “If I told you I’d have to kill you, wouldn’t I?”

The group bursts into drunken laughter and moves on to the next topic of conversation: a small-time actress who recently divorced her husband, an older film producer who left his wife of fifteen years for her. Opinions are mixed over whether the producer got what was coming to him, or if the actress is a gold-digger who deserves the abuse she’s been receiving on social media. 

Rashid has worked at a number of these parties over the years, and he notices that the drinks are flowing more freely than usual, with a frenetic sort of agitation like the promise of a storm on the horizon. It lights up the revellers from the inside, as if they have swallowed fireflies that now multiply in their bellies. Their fear is a bright thing, more disorienting for its brightness.

A woman leans against the bar, slurring her words as she asks him for a drink. She doesn’t specify what kind, so he gives her wine, and, after a moment’s hesitation, pushes a glass of water towards her as well. She is the wife of a businessman - who is sitting in a corner of the room, flirting with the owner of a prominent fashion label - and is one of the few not wearing the Western-style clothing favoured by the rich and elite. Instead she wears a dull red sari, the colour of a ruby that has lost its shine, a relic of a homeland long lost.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she says to Rashid, her voice halting and apologetic. “You should be at home, with your family, not pouring overpriced drinks for a bunch of fat cats.” Without waiting for an answer, she asks, raising her voice to be heard over the merry murmur that fills the room, “Is this really how it ends?”

“Not with a bang, but with a whimper,” the poet quips, his self-aggrandising tone suggesting that he was quoting a better poet. It earns him a few token chuckles, but otherwise her question is swallowed up by the party, regurgitated and resoundingly ignored, as around the room revellers gesture to each other with their cigarettes, clink glasses and chuckle over inside jokes.

There is a sense of bravado about their flippancy and joking. There is something unfathomable about the upcoming crisis, a steely band of silence that has wrapped around the world’s governments and the media and even social media. Twitter is exploding with speculation about what is to come, each theory more outlandish than the next.

Is this how the Romans felt as they watched the city burn? Or - closer to home - is this the luxury and opulence that the Mughals drowned themselves in even as they knew the end was coming, knew that their great empire was about to be carved up like a sacrificial cow?

The air in the room suddenly feels oppressive, pulled taut and ready to burst, or perhaps it’s the alcohol. The businessman’s wife goes outside onto the patio and lights a cigarette as she leans over the railing. She doesn’t know where her husband is, and for the first time in twenty years of marriage, she doesn’t care.

She looks out at my favourite view in the whole city: that stretch of green lawn, streaked with paleness from the floodlights, and at its centre a banyan tree older than the club itself. Gnarled and withered, its branches twisted in painful ways, it bows over the garden, ponderous. Behind it lies the sea, black and furtive on this moonless night, and the silhouettes of the mangroves rise from the water. The city’s skyline is visible from here, skyscrapers straining for the clouds with broken fingers, their lights dissolved in the smog. 

On the other side of the bay is another piece of the city: the industrial district painted in shades of grey and jagged, teeth-like edges, and the port that is the living heartbeat of the city. Fishing boats bob in the dark water like toys in a child’s bath. 

Rashid has come out as well, clearing empty glasses and overflowing ashtrays from the patio tables. The sounds of the party are muffled. They are alone except for a couple embracing in a corner, whom they ignore. 

“It’s so beautiful,” says the woman in the red sari, uncertain whether she means the view or all of it, the city cradled in the embrace of this strange night, when even the stars are blotted out.

Rashid feels a curious sense of affection for her, as if in another life she could have been his own daughter. This night has warped everyone’s emotions in strange and troubling ways. He has six daughters and only one son, but his son has been estranged from him for many painful years, and so now he tells people he has six daughters and no sons. He is untroubled by the lie. He has no patience for painful truths.

When she offers him a cigarette, he shakes his head - he quit when he got married; his wife loathed the smell - but he appreciates the gesture, the symbolism of it. She is sad but she is kind, a little ashamed of the way her friends have dismissed him and his colleagues throughout the night. A cigarette is all she has to offer. 

Inside, in the smoke-drenched room filled with the glitter of dying fireflies, the woman with the green nails has begun to dance. She spins like Anarkali performing her last dance for the enamoured Prince Salim, one final broadcast of the beauty she’s cherished so deeply all her life, a beauty now immortalised in the minds of the watching crowd.

Rashid thinks, for some reason, of his wife on their wedding day, when she had gotten up and danced with her sisters, scandalising the older women. In her heavy dress she had only been able to twirl, but in that twirl he thought she must have held the entire world under her spinning skirts. 

It’s hard to believe, in the face of such vivid movement and life, that by dawn, the world will be gone, and no one will ever dance again. 

***

I tire of the elite. Let us cross the bay.

Boats rest silently along the port, bumping each other like bodies on a crowded bus. The houses are squat, shell-shocked things, their paint stripped away by the wind and sea air. The waves carry discarded plastic bags and food wrappers and plastic bottles to the shoreline. Hundreds of sandalled feet leave impressions on the narrow, uneven road. The air is fish-stained. 

There are many pockets such as this dotted throughout the city, where lavish opulence sits hand and hand with wretched poverty, cousins shyly entwined but wary of one another. 

Between the two lies the sea, and the sea observes all, with the dispassionate grace of a lumbering, slumbering sea creature from the deep, ancient and ambivalent. It tongues the salty air, remembering a time when it made its home where these buildings now stand, before stone and concrete had beaten away the relentless growth of mangrove jungles. 

There are no parties here, though the neighbourhood’s inhabitants still defy the state-mandated curfew and roam the streets with the resilient indifference of soldiers under siege. 

Here is a teahouse, an outdoor cafe with plastic chairs and tables sinking into the uneven sand. The only light comes from the kiosk painted in the neon colours of truck art, inside which a man stirs an enormous cauldron of tea, its innards caramel brown and milky smooth. Outside, the men - and it is only men, mind you - sit in clusters, heads bent in conversation. There is no revelry, but there is an easy camaraderie, born of tiresome hours spent on the water, nets dragging through silvery waves in search of a catch.

But we begin, not with these fishermen, but with Hamid, who hurries from the kiosk with a steel tray to serve them their tea in glass mugs. He moves with the nervous energy of youth chained too long to the ground. He has a pianist’s hands, but he has never touched an instrument. In another life, maybe. 

“They were all dead,” one of the fishermen says. He has dark, shaggy brows and wrinkles around his mouth like a toad. “Every fish in my net was dead.”

“They’ve poisoned the water,” another says. He wears a flat cap, tipped low over his long face. 

There are nods of agreement, though no one bothers to ask who they are. There is always a they: insidious, indeterminable, omniscient. 

Like the buildings that surround them, the fishermen’s skin is rough and cardboard-like, weathered by the elements, baked into a powdery brown by the sun. The odd one out among them is a driver who works in the city, the brother-in-law of one of the men at the table. He began as a rickshaw driver, but now he ferries around a rich civil servant, and he lords his position over his companions.

“My boss says -” The driver pauses and takes a drag of his cigarette, savouring the moment as the others lean forward to listen. He has big ears, literally as well as metaphorically, drinking up all the titbits of gossip he overhears from his employer’s phone conversations and drunken grumbling. If information truly were currency, the driver would be the richest man at the table.

“My boss tried to leave the country,” he says. “With his family. They had plane tickets and visas and everything arranged, but when they got to the airport they were turned away. No flights leaving. He tried to bribe the Civil Aviation Authority, but no luck.”

“Now he’s just like us,” another fisherman says with a vindictive cackle. “No way to escape.”

This pleases them: this disaster, if nothing else, has proven to be somewhat of a great equaliser for an otherwise divided city.

Hamid half-listens as he sets down the tray, but the other half of his attention is on the beggar girl. She comes to the teahouse every day, an ink blue scarf pulled taut over her scalp. The owner of the teahouse makes Hamid shoo her away, worried she would bother their customers. He asked, once, if they could give her some food, but his boss refused - if you fed one beggar, he said, a hundred would show up the next day. Hamid didn’t dare press the issue, and now he feels the shame of that as he watches the girl settle on the footpath, knees drawn to her chest.

There is always someone smaller, he thinks. Someone easier to hurt. The rich man yells at his servant, the servant shoos away a beggar, the beggar kicks his child, the child throws stones at a stray dog…

The driver snaps his fingers wordlessly at Hamid, pointing at the tea, and he hurries back to the kiosk to fetch the sugar pot. The driver likes his tea extra sweet. 

“Come what may,” says one of the fishermen, in a jovial tone, “what does it concern poor men like us? As long as we have food on our tables and a roof over our heads, let the politicians resolve matters among themselves.” 

The other fisherman nods heartily, but the driver looks unconvinced. 

“If something does happen, then where are we supposed to go? Who do we turn to? 

“To God, of course,” the fishermen chorus at once.

This seems to satisfy them all, this redirection of life’s great questions into the mailbox of the unknown, a place untouchable and untraceable, to be avoided but respected. The ways of the universe are not their concern: what matters is the catch of the day, the ability to feed their children and send them to school and see them married. The space between today and tomorrow is what is most important; the rest belongs to the stars, and these men’s feet are planted firmly on earth or moored in the sea. 

Hamid envies the comfort that delegation of responsibility brings. His relationship with God has oscillated between sceptical and adversarial ever since his mother’s death. If there is a God, Hamid thinks he must be a cruel and mischievous figure, a trickster of sorts. A thief of life. His father (who scarcely had the will of character to disagree with anyone, Hamid thinks scornfully) would disagree, but he hasn’t spoken to the old man in years.

The men’s conversation returns to the safety of the mundane, complaining about soaring inflation and the police officers who knock on shop doors demanding bribes, but Hamid’s ear, again, has wandered. The beggar girl, whom he’s never heard utter a word, has begun to sing.

It’s an old song, based on a poem written by a poet who had watched the birth of the country and been so moved that language betrayed him. Hamid’s mother had never read poetry, but she had an ear for music, and she would sing that song to herself in the kitchen. The sound of it now takes him out of this dimly lit, sea-washed street and into a courtyard engulfed by bougainvillaea, the sharp-sweet smell of cardamom tea brewing, the cries of beady-eyed crows on the telephone wires. Hamid shivers.

The fishermen and the driver all stop to listen as well, and Hamid’s boss stops stirring the pot of tea, and down by the shoreline the boy who collects discarded bottles to sell them stops and turns his head towards the sound. Each one is hearing something specific and familiar and painful. Then, as one, they turn away and resume their conversations and tasks, dismissing the warning.

***

At midnight, the first boat sinks.

It is not the whimper that the would-be poet predicted, but a bang that shakes the city. Of course it begins with the sea - the sea is wrathful, the sea is vindictive. It devours a small crabbing boat, gnashing teeth tearing wooden beams and the flailing, shouting fishermen within. In the next instant it swallows a pleasure boat, whose occupants scarcely have the chance to hold up their phones to snap a picture before they, too, are dragged into the frenzied waves.

The fishermen are on their feet, fine-tuned instincts telling them that the elements do not have their best interests at heart. The driver has crawled under the table, cowering. The boy with the bottles and the teahouse owner are both praying. The beggar girl has vanished, ink-blue scarf and dirty, broken fingernails eaten up by the dark, her song a trailing echo of nothingness.

Hamid clutches the edge of the table and thinks of a nameless God who has orchestrated all of this, or perhaps a God who watches helplessly as His favourite creation sinks into ruin. Can it begin again? If it does, he will not be here to see it. Only the sea, the picture frame that surrounded his life and the city he has never left since the day he was born, will remain. 

On the other side of the bay, the partygoers come out onto the patio. Some of them are praying; all of them are screaming. The woman in the red sari is on her knees, her hair coming free of its pins. Her husband is not with her. The dancing girl has fallen over, on her back like a turtle waiting for the seagull’s claws to sink into its exposed belly.

Inside, at the bar, Rashid continues to clean a glass, even as his fingers tremble. Harsh light glitters on its sharp edges, turning his reflection into a splintered diamond. He wants to pray, but his mind is jumbled, and the words he has memorised since childhood don’t, can’t, won’t materialise from the fog. All is lost, he thinks. All are lost.

And me? I left this place long ago, but still I remain. I owe this city the honour of watching its last moments, its death throes. It writhes and flails, defiant and snarling as a cat cornered by a dog, terrified as a mouse in the talons of an eagle. Both know the inevitability of death. The people of this brave city raise their eyes to the oncoming storm with the same bitter resignation, reaching vainly into the dark in hope of finding something waiting on the other side.

Over the course of the night, all the lights in the city go out one by one, until all that remains is satiated blackness, and the purr of the lapping waves.

About the author

Shehrazade Zafar-Arif is a London-based writer who grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, a child of two cities that have both shaped and found their way into her writing. Her work has been published in Untitled: Voices, FeelsZine, and FEED Lit Mag, and she also writes for Shakespeare Bulletin, Crayon Magazine, and the Japan Society Review. She is on Twitter as @ShehrazadeZafar.

About the artist

Benjamin Erlandson combines natural light photography and timelapse to interpret natural and built landscapes across scales. Separately and together, these forms help us explore a sense of place for each of us within these spaces, within a single moment or across different time scales. The purpose of the compositions is to encourage us all to think beyond ourselves, our immediate surroundings, and shallow time horizons, expanding into something deeper and broader than what is an increasingly distracted frenetic existence (collectively and individually) on this planet we share with all species. Internally, his still and motion compositions are driven by a desire to understand the world and discuss this understanding with others in our communities, inherently sparking discussions amongst others, wherever and whenever they may be. By using various media modalities to explore the juxtaposition of space, time, and light from both internal and external perspectives of human (and non-human) relationships with water and watersheds, Erlandson can create the opportunity for awareness, understanding, and appreciation of the complexities of the world in which we live, starting with a sense of place. Find him on Instagram @beerland.