A History of Climate Change

By Nachi Keta

Through the mouth of a genetically modified orange banana.

I was an orange banana when I was brought into this world. This world was cold then, with wide expanses of cold ice and there were fiery bodies of animals swarming in it like cars on the roads of a metropolitan. Penguins were still jumping into thin-skinned lakes and ocean pools. And youngsters were still taking their pretty vows in front of each other to save the green planet. 

Today, I'm also an orange banana. But the world has changed. 

The neem leaves speak to me, potted in a porcelain jar. They say, "You know we are mere entries in an encyclopedia now. Little kids in schools read about us in online lecture halls." And I am like- "What exactly am I then? Because the entries in the encyclopedias don’t seem to define me in any quantifiable way. Am I a flower or a plant or an animal?" 

And the neem leaves tell me: "For that, you must read through old dusty online books found in Egypt. They say, in Egypt, mummy-robots take good care of them." 

Once I was with a penguin who had recently promoted herself from being an acquaintance of mine to a genuine friend. And we were traveling through the fiery landscapes of post-historic Earth. Where the ice cubes had melted and the skyscrapers had begun to topple down like packs of cards. 

It is rather drab comparing human-made skyscrapers, the symbol of man’s domination on earth, to a pack of cards. Although, that is what human beings have been doing for a long time since 9/11 but I am not a very prolific inventor of words and I shouldn’t make comparisons.

And anyway, why do the ‘meanings’ which can be expressed by one word need another one? Metaphors, that we speak of, are temporary. They live through a few centuries and then die, rot away like crabs on a sea-shore. How can you make a post-apocalyptic human understand the dissimilarity between -

1. The peace of sitting in a forest. And 

2. The peace of sitting in a concrete hall full of conditioned air

When doesn’t he have a notion of what a forest is?

Sonata and I were going through a particularly reddish landscape. There the vehicles were deeply embedded under thick layers of molten ice. And then she told me that she was hungry. 

***

The incident in the story is not as long as its preface. It is intentional. As an orange banana, I feel like a preface. 

A preface is like a little bumblebee skirting in a garden of flowers to know which of them to suck. A preface is a man not in love, trying to compare one woman with another so that he can make an informed decision. And a preface is like a lonely man in his garden. Trying to read through the lines of a little notebook where it is explained how to grow orange bananas. 

***

Sonata was hungry.

So I started looking for food in the surrounding skyscrapers. 

And drifted away from her. 

Images of wars and food cycles were howling inside my mind. They made me compare my situation with that of an antelope who looks for a bison so that the lion can have his share of food because I knew that I was an orange banana and the penguin walking beside me had been genetically-modified to be a lover of bananas. 

In truth, moments before the two of us found ourselves jumping through layers of time, she had mentioned that she would like to eat me someday. 

By then the world had come to terms with the thin line of distinction between the eater and its food. Humans told lengthy tales of bravery to chickens before giving them a painless death so that they could remain juicy. And the chickens were proud of the same. They were like Africans in pre-colonial times. Trying to find an identity in a framework of identities created by the Europeans. 

In a skyscraper which was full of pen drives and CDs and televisions and like, I found a time-hole. It was a pea-shaped pod designed to carry brute forces like me to a world where escaping from rules was not laughed at. I jumped into the pod, left my best friend the penguin, and whoosh… went past time.

***

When I found myself amid a group of penguins stuck in the snow, I knew my end was near. The penguins were not genetically modified to eat me. But there was a mulatto monkey called human. He had a writing pad in his hand and was waiting to put me in an encyclopedia. 

My end was near. But I also had the time-pod. I used it. 

***

And today I am sitting with a neem tree and thinking about encyclopedias, while the Ark on which we float, whiles away its time before it drowns.

A dropout of various institutes, Nachi Keta is a Kidney Transplant Recipient. His name is a combination of two terms Nachi, which means “death”, and Keta, which means “a creative force”. He lives with his parents, plays online Ludo, reads Existentialists, and tries to write. As of now, he has published three full-length works and a few stories and poems in various magazines and publications Howling Press and Bombay Review. A list of his works can be found at [www.nachi-keta.com]