OK, So the story so far, after hours of deliberation and knee-scratching, this is what it seems like – In the beginning the Universe was created. This made a lot of women very angry and was widely regarded as a bad move. Umm no, what the hell am I reading…

So, how did we get here? Simple. We got very bored and depressed, so one of us went and plugged herself in to an external computer feed. She talked to the computer at great length and explained her view of the Universe to it. The computer, after listening for a whole long day, and evening, and night, and onto the next day, just when the thoughts were seeming more hopeful.. committed suicide.

No, thats not correct. I mean, the computer did commit suicide eventually, but before it did, it flashed a message, it said – Life… Don’t talk to me about life. And then, it flashed two, no, three, yes, three archive photos of man-made bridges, which looked like the ones they made back in the 1980’s… You know like the ones that hung in the air in exactly the way that bricks don’t. Men made bridges all the time, to surmount obstacles like rivers, gorges, seas and Saturdays. To tell you the truth, I never could get the hang of Saturdays. The world today, in 2081, is far more tolerable without Saturdays. Saturdays, like Men, disappeared at around 2031… Curiously enough, the only thing that goes through my mind a lot nowadays is this year 2031. You see 2+0+1+3=6. 6 is the number that represents imperfection. Man was created on the sixth day, so was the serpent. Before 2031, we had six days for labour and temptation. The world stopped every seventh day. 6 is also a number that we do not have anymore, and many women have speculated that if we knew exactly why Saturdays – the sixth day of the week – went out of fashion, we will get to know a lot more about why and how Men disappeared than we do now.

One other thing, most bridges also fell in 2031, and bridges can only fall if there are earthquakes. Massive earthquakes, were there six earthquakes in 2031 as well? Saturdays, bridges and Men all gone together! Is there a link here? what happened to them? Could the photos of bridges lead us to an answer? Is the computer trying to tell us something? Did Men build the computer to tell the story of their disappearance? of their extinction? I think I am beginning to see the irony in this revelation now…

So, we atleast know this – that men built three types of bridges – The I.T.Z. bridge commonly known as “Daring”, the Y.M.A. bridge popularly known as “Audacity”, and the N.Z.M. bridge called “Suicidal Insanity.” Before I go on, I must qualify for the benefit of those who are well fed here, that I am quoting from memory, and the computer.

The computer also flashed a message – It said ‘I speak of none but the machine which is to come after me.’ I wonder why this message was necessary. And then it kept flashing this  photograph, zooming in and out, as if, it was trying to scream out louder and louder. It was the image of a vast, foggy, city of New Delhi, or as we now call it ‘The Family’ and of this legendary bridge, 3.3 miles long, with the river Munaya 150 feet below. The number 6 again. This bridge was the best example in the world of the third type – N.Z.M or “Suicidal Insanity”. It seemed more like a figment of the imagination, a ghostly ironwork extrusion vanishing in the monsoon murk, stretching to some otherworld. The image was disorienting to look at, that latticed half-bridge leaving off in midair, like some sort of Surrealist painting. It gave off a foreboding. Could this bridge have something to do with the end of Men?

By 2031, The Family was now just another one of our typical 600-million-person Indian metropolises, one of the famous Furnaces of India because of its unremitting summer heat. Daytime temperatures regularly topped seventy degrees here, which led everybody to smile for longer duration, leading to uncontrollable facial twitches and hemifacial spasms (HFS). Ofcourse all the trees had been chopped down by then—and the sun rarely shone. Meanwhile, The Family continued to explode in the noonday of the city’s hungry expansion. The past was being abandoned at an astonishing rate, the new skyscrapers and apartment buildings replacing the old neighborhoods. Everything—and everyone—was disposable. Schisms formed. The bridge loomed. Loss led to despair, which, in turn, led to Mrs. Jindal.

Mrs. Jindal is seen in this photo right next to the foot of the bridge. As I searched more about her, I found out that she had a paunch, blackened teeth, and the raspy cough of an avid smoker, and she had the eyes of a hawk, so that even when she smoked and puffed and smoked again, smoking a cheap brand named after The Family itself, her vision could pierce through her smoke. She saw everything.

Six months earlier, working as a driver for a transportation company, in 2031, Mrs. Jindal had read a story about the bridge in the papers, about mysterious jumpings having been sighted of lone men raining to their end off the bridge of Suicidal Insanity. Soon after, she quietly took her post at the West foot of the Insanity, the bridge that is. Ever since then, when not working at her job, she’d been up on the bridge, trying to fathom what was happening. This is what she found out – At least once every hour, a man, reasonably occupied and seeming like he was in a hurry to get somewhere, stopped, turned, climbed up the railing and jumped off the bridge to his death in the river below. Every hour, this happened with the precision of a clock, and it was becoming more frequent by the hour. The local people of The Family became superstitious and suggested that somebody should be ordered to smear butter over the steel railing of the bridge and also putting up notices asking men not to commit suicide there. But, there is no evidence of this having worked.

At some point, we don’t know exactly when, Mrs. Jindal decided to do something about it. She started pulling would-be jumpers from the railing. According to her blog, she was able to save 15 jumpers—and in the process had taken on a local legendary status of one of The Family’s great Mothers. One account on her blog was especially riveting, almost like a blow-by-blow of life and death on the Suicidal Insanity. One afternoon, around a hundred men came together, hand-in-hand. They were dressed in dhotis, some in ties and suits and others in jeans and t-shirts. They walked together, smiling, chatting with each other, sharing jokes and making each other read SMSes on their phones. There was a peculiar morbidity in the air, and purple colored birds flew over the bridge. At one moment, they all turned towards the railing, and started to jump off as if they were genetically programmed to do so. No hesitation, nor sign of sorrow, nor misery. It was as if their time was up, and they knew it. And they were fine with it. Much like how pigeons return to their breeding place when they are about to die, only these men were not that old. When Mrs. Jindal tried saving one of them, and pulled him off the railing back onto the bridge, the fellow displayed his first sign of rage. He was confounded, like when somebody is stopped from getting to a  train ticket counter just when his turn arrives, but is not given an explanation for it. He seemed to have become glass-eyed, and Mrs. Jindal felt this compelling need to let him be. He dragged himself back on the railing, and jumped off, only his flight down to the river was much slower than others before him, it was more like… Saturday. This had profound effect on Mrs. Jindal, although she says that the moment was not very poetic.

After some time, a total of how many men had committed suicide and how many remained, was hard to come by. Similar news reports began to appear from other major bridges across the world. The authorities around the world refused to count the tens and thousands of suicides being committed by men, simply because there was no way of conducting such a massive statistical study. Whatever strict bookkeeping records we have from 2031 do not make sense anymore, because we have also lost the Number 6 from our numeric system.

What is clear is this – It seems the governments of the day simply ignored the problem, hoping it would go away, or maybe thinking in the most Darwinian terms of suicide as its own method of population control and evolution. All we know is that day after day, week after week, month after month, Men came, they came alone, they came in pairs, in groups and in large crowds to end their lives. Most ended up in the River below, but some missed it by an inch or two, but they were all gone by the end of 2031, all but 15 whom Mrs. Jindal managed to save. It is believed that a small number of men still meet at the East foot of Suicidal Insanity every year to lights candles, sing songs, offer their thanks. We dont know for certain if they do, when they do, or if they have not had their sex-change operation yet.

Men, who were almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, were also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. They lived in fear of the time they called, “The coming of the Great Sunny Saturday”. And, it all ended without a single drop of tear!

Perhaps I’m old and tired but I always think that the chances of finding out what really was going on in 2031 are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, “hang the sense of it” and keep yourself occupied.

Text rearrangement, rewriting and original writing – Amitesh Grover
For Maya Rao, 2081 – Delhi Odyssey, Max Mueller Bhavan/Goethe Insitut, India
With Christopher Roth and Georg Diez
Saturday, March 02, 2013

Credit where due –
Reportage on suicides by Michael Paternity, Big Issues, GQ
Fragments from Douglas Adams’ writings – The world in 2081 has several of his prognoses manifested into outbreaks, he himself having attained the status of a prophet in the form of a ‘sentient puddle’.