the world will always look like her residents

The premise is set thirty years later, when an organisation decides to interview three of the very few survivors of the Covid-19 pandemic in three different cities. It is a tedious task to try and explain how an entire world would look like thirty years from now. The author therefore, tries to complete it by taking help from these three characters. The overlying metaphor is that the fate of the world would always be tethered to the people living in it. This is an attempt to understand the world through a series of character sketches, each character is unique in every aspect and each of them portray unique emotions, resulting in a different writing style in each of their cases. The idea is that each character acts like a segment of the world. The piece is hence meant to be read like an assortment of experiences and thoughts.

‘The Firm proposes that an office in each of the member countries conducts a series of interviews and tests with those who survived the pandemic thirty years ago and overcame the hurdles. The Enterprise believes it would be inspiring for the younger generations to listen to their firsthand experiences...’

Mrs. Patricia hung up the receiver. deep breaths, deep breaths. It was a warm June morning. The bright sunlight contrasted with the blinding white tube light in the office. Mrs. Patricia plucked out a tiny rectangular tin box from the pocket of her coat and opened it, revealing multicoloured pills inside. she picked up one with her thumb and her bony index finger, and swallowed it; then coughed dryly. a light breeze entered through the open window uninvited and Mrs. Patricia shivered a little, and was reminded once again of her growing age. She traced the slight wrinkles on her cheeks and just below her ears with the back of her hand, and was abruptly woken up from her daydream by the phone. she sighed and picked it up. ‘The Firm proposes that an office in each of the member countries conducts a series of interviews and tests with tho-’ Mrs. Patricia cussed loudly into the receiver and hung up again. She picked up a pen and started writing a note to the Tokyo office-‘The Firm proposes that...’

TOKYO-2051

‘can you please pronounce your name once, miss? for the record, yes, just once, loud and clear...’

the woman’s dry lips parted to let out the word- ‘aiko’;

‘and can you please spell it out-’

yes miss it’s spelled eh-eye-kay-oh.

there was something odd about the way her eyes never let out more than was required. her straight brown hair came down to her waist. she kept looking down at her fingernails, which were busy picking on each other.

‘how old were you when the pandemic arrived?’

miss i was fifteen years old one-five fifteen. thirty years ago, was it? anyway i lived with my father and my mother near machida-

‘and are they-’

yes miss both of them are dead and i miss them terribly next question, please.

The crusty yellow walls of the room reeked of old paint and despair. the ceiling looked like it could fall down any moment now, and yet it housed a tiny fan that groaned when it moved. aiko sighed.

LONDON-2051

‘Your name please, sir?’

‘Oliver’,Oliver wheezed slowly. the woman who sat across the table scribbled something on a white sheet of paper that smelled slightly of vanilla. The air was filled with the light fragrance of her perfume. Oliver felt small in the high-ceilinged fancy office room, where the woman sitting in front of him sat everyday. The table that sat between them was made of glossy teak, and Oliver traced the top with his index finger that he struggled to hold up for long. The room faced the busy street below, and the french windows allowed slight amounts of sunlight to enter. He had worn his tuxedo that day, but it had turned into a stuffy mess, and he had to pull on his tie every couple of minutes in order to allow some air to enter.

‘And your age?’

‘eighty-seven’ Oliver said hoarsely. ‘I was a bit older than fifty-six during the pandemic’ he picked up the glass of water kept in front of him and gulped it down in one go. He tried to get up and adjust his chair, but felt a sharp jolt of pain in his right knee. It was in moments like these that he felt death creep up to him. He groaned and pressed it tightly, sitting back on the uncomfortable chair.

‘Who did you live-’

PARIS 2051

‘with?’

Acel thought it was an absurd third question. He scratched his nose before answering.

‘I was, what, like, seven? No, eight in twenty-twenty, so I lived with my mother and my grandma. My father had passed away when I was just a kid, so yeah, mother and grandma. And, oh, wait, we also had a cat, Ms. Puffers, we called her, yes’

Acel had bright golden hair, and dark brown freckles on his face. He was also hungover and had completely forgotten about this interview until this morning when his phone rang.

LONDON

'I lived with my wife and our little daughter, my own mother had passed away the previous year due to a cardiac arrest but-

‘Mr. Oliver please explain only what is necessary’

‘Of course, sorry’

Mr. Oliver felt an ick in his chest and his brow furrowed. The air shifted. Chanel ‎N°5 mixed with bright disrespect.

PARIS

'How did it affect you, the pandemic-

could you please get off your phone, sir?'

'Uh, yeah, just a second, yes, well the pandemic, surely, surely affected me, I mean, not financially because we were financially stable, my family was pretty well to do, we had this cotton textile mill somewhere around the house, I can’t remember where. Mother did contract the virus once if I remember correctly, but she quickly recovered after she was admitted to a hospital right here in um, Arsenal? I think it was Arsenal. Shit, can I please pick up this call? It's very urgen-'

'Please sir, just this one-'

LONDON

'What impact did the pandemic have on your financial status, Mr. Oliver, your wealth?'

Oliver's heart skipped a beat. 'Would it be alright if I decided to skip that one? Let's just say we didn't come from money. Nor did my wife, and we lived a very hard life until the pandemic made it worse-’

'Absolutely okay, you were supposed to answer every one of them but let's just move onto the next one. What do you believe-'

TOKYO

‘has changed in the last thirty years? how is the world different now?’

aiko stopped biting her nails and cleared her throat nervously.

it’s not really a question of material miss because sure economies collapsed and were built again and people died and more people arrived and entire countries ceased to exist and more came up but all that is bullshit it doesn’t really matter when you think about the whole large world miss. what matters is how the people miss how we have changed and i believe people have grown more empathetic towards each other but the world is a cruel place and it always has been miss but i believe it is up to us to clean up the mess in the end it is upon us really to decide whether we want to do something about something that goes wrong or whether we want to sit quietly at our homes and cry about it to the television and this choice i think is essential in undoing whatever has happened in the last thirty years and building a better world for ourselves because what are people if not instruments of choice? can i please have a glass of water miss?

PARIS

'Nothing, absolutely nothing, in my opinion. It all still starts with power and ends with power. Money still runs this world. The difference is that some of us, like me, understood it far earlier than the others. Money will always run the world. The people who come down on the streets, raising slogans and cursing the government and whatnot, they're fools. Because in the end, they won't change anything. They simply can't. A rich man would pay someone to overturn a decision, and the people would go home thinking that it was them that did it. What are people if not sore losers?'

LONDON

'What do you mean, the world? What is the world? Who makes it and changes it and destroys and rebuilds it? We do.' Oliver said, rubbing his palms together. He sniffed. Chanel was gone, and they had been replaced by heavier scents of People and Liberties and The Fate Of The World. It was in moments like these that he felt Lincoln creep up to him. Oliver sighed before beginning again. 'What I mean is that worlds do not change, it is the people who change and so the world changes along with them. In fact, what are people-no, what is the world, if not the people living in it?' He felt something rise up in his chest like warm yeast then send a shiver down his spine.

'Thank you very much, sir, that would be all'