THE LIFE OF A CITY

In the mornings -

Men and smart young women walk briskly to offices, laptop bags slung over one shoulder, a leather handbag or brief case clutched in one hand, a mobile phone clasped in the other.

School buses shudder across roads, crawl past manholes, and jolt over speedbreakers. Screaming children hang out of the windows, waving soot-spotted handkerchiefs.

In the afternoons -

Old women sit by their window sills, parting curtains covered in soot and grime, drinking weak tea, watching cars and cycles pass below.

The sound of a hundred rival soap operas playing on a thousand television screens, the sounds of snores, of love-making, of phonecalls and barking dogs push past closed doors, and merge into a blurred cacophany.

In the evenings -

Mothers bring their children out to the parks. They sit silently on benches covered in pigeon droppings, and watch their children play. Their hair is pinned up, hap-hazardly, in a straggly bun. There is something strange in their gaze - at once abstracted and familiar. They look as if the world is passing them by. They sigh, absently, and move a lock of hair back, as the wind stirs.

In houses, husbands and wives glare each other. A heavy silence hangs between them, full of unsaid things. A door bangs, a tear falls, a car speeds away.

A child sits, by a window, watching the sunset. He jumps up, when he hears a car back into the garage. But it's the neighbors. A maid comes in, with dinner on a tray, and leaves it on a nearby table. The child pushes the tray away.

In the nights -

Lovers meet, for a tryst, but they are tired and fall asleep.

The beat of a nearby night-club keeps a secretary, living alone in a squalid, one-room apartment, up the whole night. Unable to sleep, she gets up and crouches by her tiny window, watching beautiful, rich young men and women cue outside the night club. A glint of gold jewellery catches her eye. She turns to see a young woman, her age, dressed in a tight red skirt, with stiletto heels. She is laughing, one hand wrapped around a handsome man. The secretary recognizes the man - he is an actor from a prime-time soap.

A car drives past, stops and blocks her view. When the car passes, the couple have disappeared.

She sighs, and tries to go back to sleep.

Past midnight -

The city is asleep. Men and women toss in their beds, in the clutches of Dream. As one young man, writhes. He moans, he sweats. He grimaces, asleep, in pain.

Finally, he awakens. He rolls across his bed, opens his drawer, and pops a pill. He sinks back into bed, and falls asleep. A dream uncoils from his head, slides out in a whispery, grey vapour from his ear, and drifts into the sky, to join a poisonous Cloud of Dreams, hovering above the earth.

The cloud shrieks, flashes, and moans. It rolls across the sky, and goes to torment the sleep of others.
.
When the young man awakens, he can not remember his dreams.

And so the days -

Are changeless, mornings fade into afternoon, lapse into evening and slip into night. The months march past, patterned by such days, the seasons move in a steady progression, as the stars slowly shift their places in the night sky.

Thus years pass.

The people of this city live their lives in this constant, unvarying fashion - a life of mornings, evenings and nights, a life of absent dreams, pregnant silences and forgotten longings.