Seeker woke up the next morning feeling more rested than he had for a long time. The events of the previous night might as well have been a terrible dream. However, the dull ache in his calves from running and the incisions in his right palm from clutching at the jagged rock served as physical reminders of the brutal reality of the night before.

His home consisted of a makeshift dwelling of roughly ten feet by ten feet, built using blue tarp sheets. This tarp tent stood in a corner on the sixth floor of an unfinished twenty story building that was ramshackled and mostly vacant. His bedding took up most of the space within his tent and the space was shared between a few pots and supplies and there was a row of clothes, neatly stacked up on the other side. All of his possessions could have been folded into a large bag.

As he moved a flap of tarp out of the way to look out, he saw two cities simultaneously. One was Bombay, the capital of the District, and the other a giant slum that he lived in, that was technically part of Bombay, but might as well have been another universe in itself. It was the dark underbelly that the city had never ever been able to truly deal with. It was a popular misconception that the Terrible War had been responsible for this dichotomy, but those who were born in a period before the War never remembered it any differently. There had always been two cities for two sets of people with two very different lives.

The slum was large - about a mile wide and another mile across - and because a million people somehow contrived to squeeze into that space, it was tightly packed. It was littered with impossibly full, ramshackled hutments that time had not been kind to. None of these structures was more than two stories tall, and they were all arranged in criss-cross patterns with narrow, crooked alleyways between them. Many were colored a pale yellow and the exterior walls told stories of suffering, hardship and erosion. There was exposed brick in most huts, pipes and rusted iron bars were on show in some, and blue tarp sheets that adorned every one of them without exception provided meagre protection from the rains that lashed down on the District for multiple months at a time. Old timers from the pre-War era told tales of how the monsoons were limited to three or four months a year many moons ago, but changing weather patterns had reversed that trend to the point where there were now maybe three or four months in a year when it did not rain, and there was now a mist that seemed to permanently hang over the slum, like a miasma of despair.

There was a vast expanse of open space in the middle, and part of this space had turned into an enormous bazaar for the residents of the slum, the Insiders, as they were referred to. These were shops and businesses that catered exclusively to those that lived within the slum walls.

The slum was flanked on the south side by tall structures that had started off as an attempt to bring permanent, affordable housing to slum dwellers, but corruption scuppered those plans and what were supposed to be bastions of hope and a bright future quickly turned into monuments of failure. Furthermore, they also suffered heavy shelling during the War. So here they were, decayed by time, ravaged by war and defiled by the greed of men. It wasn’t uncommon for migrant workers who built these sorts of structures to make a home in them, but these buildings were considered especially bad luck, and superstition kept even the most desperate people away. Seeker could have chosen to live elsewhere if he so desired, but he did not mind the relative solitude that this space afforded, nor did he believe that simply occupying the space would make any ill luck befall him. He also quite liked the view.

He folded his mattress and tucked it into a little corner of his living space.The floor around him had the dark grey color of concrete, and the space had no walls or windows, offering him a panoramic view out to as far as the eye could see. He had picked a corner from where he could see the entirety of the slum, and the world beyond. He heated a pot of tea on a portable stove and sat on an edge, with his legs dangling over a sixty foot drop. While it wasn’t unusual for him to sit this way, on this day it almost felt to him as if he were taunting death after his lucky escape from last night. He smiled at that thought as he took a look below. As he surveyed the slum in the distance, he became aware of a throbbing headache. He poured himself some sweet, milky tea and continued to gaze out. He was in an especially contemplative mood. His eyes began searching for that corner of the slum where he grew up.

His earliest memories were of living with his mother in a hut not too much bigger than the space he currently occupied. He remembered the times when his mother used to hold him in her arms and tell him she loved him and fed him blocks of sugar when she could not afford any better. He did not have a single photograph of her, but he could close his eyes and picture her small, kind face. In his mind, he realized, she probably looked prettier and happier than she actually was, but he wanted to keep it that way. Over the years, his recollection of her face was getting more and more blurry and he was scared that he may forget it entirely some day, a thought that bothered him greatly.

As he was lost in his thoughts, he poured himself a second cup of tea and felt his headache recede somewhat. However, there was a thought forming in his mind which now bothered him more than the physical pain. He couldn’t stop thinking about how close he had been to joining his mother the previous night, and while there was some solace in believing in this particular version of the afterlife, the part that really nagged him was the realization that it would not have mattered to anyone if he had died. His body would have been wrapped up and he would have been shoved into the ground in a nondescript place. If he were lucky, they’d even plant a tree over his resting place. No one would know or care about him, or his life.

It made him think of the day his mother died. He must’ve been eight or nine years old; he couldn’t say for sure. “The poor don’t have the time to keep track of time”, he remembered his mother saying.

She was the one person who he spent every waking moment with. He didn’t even have memories of his father; neither did he ask his mother about such a person, nor did he care. Apart from being his mother, she was also his father, sibling and best friend all rolled into one. She was his entire world.

She woke him up and bathed him, made their daily meal of wheat flatbread with leftover vegetables from the night before and packed the rolls neatly into handkerchiefs. She then went to the sewing machine in the corner of their hut and mended people’s hats and clothes and bags. When there wasn’t anything to sew, she created a makeshift baby carrier from old sheets and he would be attached to her snugly, like a marsupial, while she did odd jobs at construction sites, cleaned floors and storefronts, and just about anything she could to make sure they didn’t go hungry. Her dark skin was sun baked and her hands had far too many lines and calluses, but it didn’t stop her from smiling. Seeker’s clothes were never new but always clean, and his plate was nearly always full. She told him stories that she had heard as a child from before the War when fresh vegetables and fruit were available more regularly, with mangoes being her particular favorite. Seeker had merely heard about the fruit, never tasted it.

“Sekar, I can’t wait for you to try them”, she said to him during these recollections, as they ate a simple meal of rice and lentils.

As he grew older, he continued to accompany her to construction sites, and while he was still too young to be able to help, he would spend the days playing with other kids such as himself. It was often noisy and dusty, but to these kids, these unfinished concrete hulks were the only playground they knew. Seeker would often go home covered in a thin film of brown dust, so did his mother. It was almost an unspoken rule that once a child hit a certain age, they would automatically transition from playing around the site to helping out. However, just as Seeker was about to get to that age, his mother was unable to work at the construction sites any longer. At first, she started to cough a lot until it came to a point when she couldn’t walk a few steps without panting heavily. She ended up spending more and more time at her sewing machine before she started to get too sick to even sit up for too long.

Towards the end, Seeker remembered her saying she was tired a lot. She would lie down daily and often, and he would try to make wheat flatbread like she did, but it never quite turned out as thin or as soft, but she didn’t complain. He called the kindly looking man with the stethoscope and went to the market to buy the medicines. The end came suddenly and quite abruptly. One day, he was alarmed by the wheezing sounds his mother made every time she tried to draw a breath in. He ran to her bedside and held her hand. At some point, he noticed that she stopped struggling and surrendered. Her face wasn’t contorted in agony anymore. It relaxed and took on an almost peaceful appearance. That would be his last memory of her. He was much too numb to even realize what was happening when four men put her on a cot, covered her with a white piece of cloth and took her away in a van. It only hit him then that the pillar that supported his entire world had crumbled, leaving him all alone.

Seeker did not consider himself an overtly emotional person. His life had hardened him in a way that did not afford him such luxuries. He had coped with his mother’s loss because he had no choice not to. However, at that moment, he felt strangely vulnerable. He realized that his eyes were moist. It had started off being a relatively clear day, but there was now a persistent drizzle in the air. He set his cup of tea down and put his hands out, palms facing upwards to collect a few droplets and then ran his hands over his face. He shifted his gaze between the patch of land where he had spent his entire life, and the metropolis beyond.

He saw the familiar backdrop, but started considering it with a new curiosity. There were impossibly tall buildings that seemed to apologize for the slum, and reach straight for the sky. He saw streets with many lanes in the distance where vehicles were zipping past at dizzying speeds. He saw several aircraft gliding across the grey clouds. But there was one building in particular that caught his eye.

There was a sphere atop one of the tall buildings that was meant to resemble the earth. It was rotating at a gentle speed, seemingly to mimic the rotation of the earth. Seeker sat and kept looking at this motion for what could have been seconds, minutes or lifetimes. That building, he was to find out later, housed the Indus District’s headquarters of the IA. In that instant, the gently rotating sphere in the distance calmed him and stirred something within him, but for a long time he couldn’t grasp what it was. Then suddenly, it hit him. Something about that structure had made him reconsider his future. He had never really thought about what direction his life would take.

Up until this point in his life, the slum had been his entire reality, and he had drifted along in the eddies of circumstances that were usually outside his control. They had shaped everything about him. The real and imaginary walls between the slum and the outside world were the limits of his existence. Anything he did would have only mattered within those walls, which was to say it wouldn’t really matter at all, in the grand scheme of things. He knew he had to change that. He had to find out what the Outside was like. He had watched flashes from that world while browsing the news on the Nets, or watching shows on his Slate, but had never ever been part of that world. He knew that any relative stability he felt on the Inside was an illusion, especially for someone like him. He wanted to get away from the world where one wrong turn could mean a death sentence.

He made his mind up. Seeker was going to try and make it on the Outside.

Next Chapter: 1.4 Dream