WorkSpace

Shumi was flying. Save for a scarlet slash of cloth across her hips, she was naked and she didn’t care. With the certainty of dream knowledge she knew that bare skin was necessary to allow a seamless control of the air flow over her wings and body. Turning her dream-tunnelled vision left and then right she gazed at her wings - arching painlessly upwards, two pure silver impossible arcs propelled her effortless, wheeling progress above the endless, glittering scintilla of the Dhakan canalways. A glance down along her prone, airborne form showed her a body rippling with flexing, metallic auxiliary remex feathers, providing both lift and directional control. There was no time (or space) for disbelief; the dream was at once both completely real and utterly strange.

A tiny part of her mind was aware that she was skirting the thermal above the downtown desalination plant and without conscious thought she leant into the vast column of warm rising air (using another strange sense that she cared not to analyse), to guide her into the most efficient route upwards. As she gained altitude the silver tributaries of the Dhakan canals fractalized, coalescing into a larger picture of the Ganges delta; a beautiful, delicate decayed leaf outline that disguised the gigatonnes of effluent and top soil erosion that washed endlessly from South East Asia into the Bay of Bengal.

From here she could not see the deforestation, or the poverty, or the exploitation, and the air had retained a rare early morning clarity that sang through her wings. Always visible though was the perfect circular pox scar of the impact crater; from two kilometres up she could see the new growth of reclamation efforts but ten years of work and febrile life had made little impact in the gargantuan bite out of Dhaka. Topping out at 2500 meters the thermal spat her out above the light cloud cover into a gelid, golden space of dazzling morning sunlight. Effortlessly trimming and tweaking fingertip flight feathers she deep-rolled back towards home; it was time for school…

Waking hard and gummy into the grey, humid morning light, Shumi groaned at the grief of loss, instead of the warm ethereal silk of air on her body there was only the raspy UNAID surplus blanket, still smelling faintly of the chewed and woven plastic bottles that gave up their lives for a developing world recycling effort. Her waking transitions were always difficult. She never dreamed lightly, for her each night was an involuntary excursion into a fully realised world, each with its own challenges, terrors and joys. One of her sense-blunted Western peers might achieve the same effect with a Sony Haptic rig but Shumi just felt like she had two jobs to do; an eighteen hour waking world of exhaustion and a night time lottery of immersion. Lying for a few moments on her narrow cot Shumi mustered energy for the day ahead, the silvery threads of Dhaka from altitude still clear in her mind’s eye. The rivers were always there in her dreams, sometimes swollen and torrential, in other dreams merely dusty wadis with barely a trickle of water, but always the rivers.

She irritably shrugged off the cloying tendrils of the dream and got her day face on. Duty called and Shumi always obeyed. Polished black shoes, shiny Lilliputian scarab beetles, laces just so. Grey wool longshorts, three days wear, a fading crease, two little stains, they’ll do. A hypnotically bright white shirt, plastic fresh and polymer perfumed. Her best tie, Friday’s sock, clean teeth - time for school. Shumi Majumdar had a job to do, no one else was going to do it, and a lot of people were relying on her. Shumi is a teacher, she is twelve years old, and her school has over fifty pupils.

Breakfast was the normal frantic, dim fumble in the half light of the early Dhakan morning, the chick-like cawing of her hungry brothers, sated with butter fried flat bread and milked cooled in the damp earth under the plywood floor of her home. School started at eight o’clock sharp (no excuses!) and Shumi liked to be early; her youngest brother Antu delighted in goading and thwarting her punctuality, his piping seven-year old voice prodding and teasing from the moment she opened her eyes in the damp morning gloom. She never berated him though, only the gentlest chide with a roster-last serving of breakfast, or a mildly sadistic hair brushing - Antu got a pass because of the Deal. The Deal had never been spoken - proper planning was for the time-rich and comfort enabled. The Deal has never been written down, only Shumi can write and a child’s intuitive poverty-born censorship meant that she knew that whatever was tangible could be stolen. The Deal was never discussed; in a world of perpetual uncertainty the instant tradition of a shared, unspoken secret was the Majumdar family shield.

It could have gone either way. A haven-distributed, largely tax-free windfall of over two hundred and fifty million Euros can have a delirious effect on anyone. To a centless decon worker from the crushing fields of Chittagong it was initially mostly beyond comprehension. A slightly more culture saturated target of benefaction would have gone through the standard stages of lottery burn rate. By the 30s LBR was an established, observable, behaviour meme – infinitesimally marginal lottery variants had been evolved and honed to maximise their pacification effect. Simultaneously micro-taxing and distracting, the reality show, the phone-in, the lotto, the raffled home, had all cohered into a mass participatory amalgam of hysterical, shrieking bullshit that underpinned a billion euro cable market, and a thousand cock sucking remora peripheral outfits eager to cash into one of the few growth markets left. Latterly legitimatised via a number of degree and post-graduate level courses in the subject, Lottery Studies had carefully identified the typical responses stages from the (typically) low income recipient of a lottery win.

Elation: Characterised by intoxicant consumption and list making.

Anxiety denial: OCD levels of concern about security of winner designator (ticket/estub/SMS etc).

Discretion flip-flop: Elation stage wild promises regretted in a fug of hangover.

Belief curve: Dawning realisation that the recipient can now purchase any amount of shiny crap they want.

Consumer phase: Profligate period of conspicuous consumption, characterised by scant regard for tastes, appropriateness or dimensional suitability for the pre-win living space. 

Janahara was not particularly intrinsically more discreet, or tasteful, or psychologically balanced than the average winner; it was just that nine years of a slum dwelling childhood, followed by nearly twenty five years of adulthood under the thumb of Iqbal Karim at the Madhom yard had equipped him with only a very specialised set of societal tools. Janahara could have discussed at some length the importance of territorial boundary maintenance in male-only habitation environments, or drone level workplace ingratiation techniques – he could not however name this year’s Big Brother contestants (possibly though he might have approved of the current show format – contestants were now vying for critical medical procedures for both themselves and their families). The result of his privation and relative isolation meant that Janahara was a kind of a cripple, mostly lacking in the ability to consume correctly. As a result his quarter billion Euros paradoxically lacked some of the impact that it might have for another more media reflexive winner. 

He had a shit phone, a small boat, a dumb computer that was mostly left switched off in his small office, and he had stayed in Dhaka. This had not made him invisible (off-grid living was a paranoid survivalist wet dream with no scope in the current reality), his boat was routinely pinged by the creaky Dhaka ANPR network when he went out (as were all legal vehicles), a record of his postaghar purchase was logged and easily accessible at the government database at Curzon Hall. But in a world of cheap, fat, wireless bandwidth availability Janahara was somewhat of a throwback. He used a quasi-sentient enabled maildrop that handled the vast majority of his email (he was no crackberry whore), and most of the time his shit phone was switched off. This made him a frustrating manager in some ways, but the face to face courtly business etiquette he had unselfconsciously developed won him a lot of respect with a lot of the old guard in the Dhaka business world, and the more contemporary wave of ultra-paranoid, physical key exchanging, tech start-ups admired the intrinsic security that his style allowed. As a result Janahara maintained an open office surgery at his postaghar clave every Thursday morning. There he met with reps from hydrodynamic and flood management outfits (both local and foreign), local Rotary groups curious about this business newcomer (in Dhaka you need to be established for over twenty years before you stop being the “new guy”); he also ejected about ten attendees each week claiming to be part of his family (a salvia swipe always took care of these familial claims but sometimes it made for good sport to hear the latest fictional claim on his wealth). So, in a relentlessly online and endlessly recursive semantically webbed world, Janahara has developed a curiously solid physical presence that has propelled him, in only several short years, to the forefront of the Dhaka small business world.

Janahara is not complacent, hard wired by poverty to assume nothing and expect little, he is hobbled a little by a tunnel vision that was born from the need to address the immediate – the next meal, the latest untreated infection, the uncertain ownership state of his slum hovel. This focus on minutiae has stayed with him – a pocket slapping nervous tic that sometimes blinds him to the larger picture around him. It took him a while before he got the message.

A dawn boat jam in Amligola, all the air horns inexplicably synchronising at once into a bellowing assonance: Jaaaaaannaaaaaaa.

A cute lead out human interest item on the local news showing a series of cloud formations shot by a butcher from the Gulshan market – each one a near perfect rendering of the Bengali glyph of the letter J.

A call from his bank manager asking him (with barely contained glee) if he was going to be keeping the recent despot of ninety million takas in his current account; and them the subsequent call from the same manager apologising for an unaccountable database error – there was no such deposit.

Eventually, it took the hijacking of an infomercial idoru to smash the message home to Janahara. Unable to sleep in the crushing humidity, he was blearily watching an endless demonstration of a pointlessly over-engineered kitchen mandolin on one of the shopping channels when the screen momentarily glitched. The beautifully rendered (ostensibly female) demonstrator dropped its plasticky gee-gaw and looked straight to camera:

“Janahara, read your fucking email.”

It turned out that saving the world was a bit of a let down, there was just so much crap to deal with. When he was at the Madhom yard (and when he had had the energy to think about it), it had seemed simple: Remove the bloatware management goons, up the base-level day rate by an order of magnitude and decree a 5-day working week. Not without a substantial amount of irritation he learned the same lesson that a thousand previous owner/managers had learned the hard way – the hundred and one ills and wrongs committed by the management are just the poorly articulated output of a deeply imperfect machine. It was almost a personal insult to realise that the vast majority of crushing and repeated inequities of management drip-down were the unthinking and retarded reflexes of a floundering behemoth. Not quite the blueprint that Janahara had in mind when he started building his own new world, but a clean slate helped, he was a quick study and he had made some headway. 

His concept was sound though (if unconventional by Dhaka standards): a four pod industrial postaghar with (unusually generous) living facilities for up to thirty workers. The postaghar structures had become the dominant urban structural form in Bangladesh in the last few years – the annual monsoon flooding combined with ever-increasing meltwater flow from the Himalayas meant that periodic flooding had eventually given away to a near permanent state of high water. The stilted postaghar dwelling was ideally suited to the brackish shallows that now covered over half of modern Bangladesh; a variable height telescoping stilt structure combined with state of the art meteorological forecasting meant that Janahara could cope with the floods and all but the worst weather that the Bay of Bengal could throw at him.

The cityscape of Janahara’s (dimly remembered) youth was long gone; the tuk-tuk a rare sight now, replaced instead with shoals of aluminium-hulled open top outboards – most with PV solar panel generators flashing blindingly in the sun, other less legal variants still touting wheezing two-stroke engines running on a mish-mash of hydrocarbon variants. Climate change and pitiful international funding had forced Dhaka to replaced its gated communities and shanties with another type of island – a squabbling archipelago of low atolls trading loudly and querulously in a meagre marketplace of diminishing fresh water, flu stricken fowl and custom code. 

Janahara’s postaghar compound was a beacon of hope in Dhaka; a three storey cutting edge design of genetically modified bamboo and smartweave providing a much needed source of employment in an insanely competitive job market. The latest cofferdam tech (one of the few growth areas in lowland Bangladesh) utilised by Janahara meant that the compound also provided an excellent venue for one of the best restaurants in town – the Baily Garden Restaurant, late of the now (mostly) submerged New Baily road. Janahara had cycled past the Baily countless times in his previous life, the smells wafting from the kitchen a torture to his empty purse and stomach. The Money had not made him profligate but he had indulged some extravagances – on the proviso of promised commercial resurrection he had bought, for a single taka, the entire outfit: the chefs, the waitrons, the décor, and had it transplanted to his clave - now he eats shukti and chapati whenever he wants.

Perched on his own stool in the corner of the second-floor restaurant balcony – four meters above the stagnant flood water - he can nearly ignore the stagnant nightmare that Dhaka has become and start to plan his future.