The Green Shroud
Lately my apartment has been in the news a lot. For all the wrong reasons.
One of the towers, E block, has been leaning. The Greater Bengaluru Authority has ordered it demolished. I have tried to ascertain the angle myself. Three of my fellow dwellers have each confidently pointed it out to me, in three different directions.
Here is the tower, from my window, on the day I started writing this.
The news and social media coverage, however, has been quite interesting, to say the least.
I asked around. The AI-assisted consensus is that the tower will fall on its own in three months, which would save everyone a lot of paperwork.
Then there is the illusionary technique. The picture is correct. The tower in it is ours. A red box is drawn around it at an angle, and the eye does the rest.
I moved the box to the next tower. It is also in severe danger.
None of this is to say the matter is small. The builder will suffer the loss, and the reputation. The worst sufferers are the people who had booked a flat in E block and were waiting for keys.
Right after them come the SNN residents whose kids go to TCIS, the school next door. Mine do. The school has gone online, and we are back in a Covid memory. Laptops on the dining table, a teacher in a little square, a child unmuting to ask if he can go to the bathroom.
The worst part is that not an inch of the building had fallen, while the kids have already attended two weeks of online classes.
Teachers bear the brunt of every parent’s scrutiny. After two weeks of this, I can’t help but sympathise with how they handle the kids the whole day in a classroom.
Further down the list, in a category of one, is me again. I was looking forward to the pickleball courts and the extra landscaped garden that were to come up with E block. I had not played pickleball before, but I had already decided I would be good at it.
Since Then
Since I wrote the above, two floors have come off the top of E block. The developer calls its method precision technology, and on the evidence from my window, it is precise. A floor at a time, from the top, under the netting. It is the most careful anyone has been with this building all year.
Nobody filmed it. No reel, no red box, no excavator chewing at the base of a building forty years older than ours. The accounts that had it collapsing in July have moved on to TCL Super Sunday. The only people who noticed are the ones who look out of the window, and the three neighbours, who now agree on the angle.
Eliot said the world would end not with a bang but a whimper. E block is going the same way, a floor at a time, under a green sheet, while the internet waits for the bang it already posted.
