The City that Leaked Out

Between any adjacent pair of cities,there are connecting paths carrying all those elements which endow a city with its 'city'-ness.Railways tracks,for example.Highways bearing trucks carrying cement, steel wires,petrol, cars, pasteurized milk, cold drinks,burgers, asbestos sheets, televison sets,--just about anything trucks could carry.Electrical power lines shooting over empty fields.The most sensational city rumours  transferred over telephone cables worming through the barren earth.Gas and hyper-mineralized water running through huge pipes crawling across the landscape like anacondas of infinite lengths.


Yet as it often happens, too many drunk truck drivers are skidding off their paths and crashing into the weeds and bushes.It might explain why this inter-city space is not as deserted as the view from our speeding cars suggests.Indeed,at around a kilometre from the asphalt roads, there is a fairly habitable hut with an asbestos roof.This oasis might also be miraculously blessed with a colour television(fed by antennae which caught a few of those stray television signals),powered by wires which trace their origin to an ingenious system of hooks tapping onto the power lines.On the rare occasion which turns festive they enjoy pasteurized milk.A couple of the kids frolicking in the scrapyard have shoes with spikes.

Now it is true that not every boy has a shoe with spikes.But they share.In the evenings, the whole city descends at the doorstep of the hut with the best sixth generation Plasma Screen TV to catch the episode of their favourite American TV series.We will never have the city people complaining of an unjust distribution of resources among themselves.How grateful they are that they have all they do.And  they get more and do more and become every day,more of a city than they were yesterday.With what joy they celebrated the night when one of them figured out a way to make telephone calls without paying a single penny.And for days on, there were people queuing up to use the phone to dial random permutations of numbers to talk to random people in random parts of the world speaking the most random of unheard languages.



Thus,we have a city that was not meant to be.An invisible point in the super-smart national grid.A city that congealed into one with all this city-ness leaking out.A city without billboards that doesn't seek too much attention but a real city all the same,just about keeping its nascent city-ness intact.