Gordon Weetman

1.

Starving people on TV: a sight so familiar it verges on cliché. These appeals are becoming ever more frequent, global weather conditions having recently taken a turn for the worst. Stick men – skeletal beings moving through a parched landscape. Children with pregnant bellies, visible ribs.

The narrator announces that the problem is one of distribution. I’m not sure if I should believe him. Is it possible in an era in which a message can traverse the earth at the click of a mouse, in which I can choose between three types of mango at my local supermarket, that these obstacles should prove insurmountable? Is our failure to feed the starving millions truly, as the narrator claims, a logistical one? Or is it a failure of will?

The bodies on my TV screen are lean to the point of invisibility – spindly pencil-sketches slowly being erased. The world seems unmoved by their looming disappearance. The stick men sit with their heads in their hands, or lie motionless as though practising for the inevitable. The world keeps turning. Soon they will fall off the end of it, like mediaeval sailors. The stick men sit with their heads in their hands. The world keeps turning.

A telephone number ticker-tapes across the bottom of the screen. The number is a hotline for donations. Pen and paper in front of me. I don’t bother to write it down.

2.

That night I dream I see heaven. It’s not the first time this has happened to me. The heaven of my dreams is an island fortress: a vast, white citadel way out in the middle of the sea. For some reason in my dream, heaven has closed its gates, but people still keep trying to reach it. Their desperation for another life, a second chance, drives them to undertake voyages of near-unimaginable peril.

To start with, the mainlanders’ boats are barely seaworthy, and an increasing paucity of natural resources (most available materials having already been turned into schooners, galleons, sampans, etc.) means that the vessels in which they set to sea grow more and more primitive. Before long, they are using plastic kayaks, rubber dinghies, floating tyres: anything, really, that they can get their hands on. Anything that might lend their emaciated carcasses a gram or two of buoyancy.

The journey is long and arduous. Many of the boatpeople perish en route. The remains of these ill-fated persons are invariably consumed by their shipmates, malnutrition being the trump card in any moral debate. The deceased, run most arguments, are martyrs: they have sacrificed their own lives so that others may find salvation. Some of the more barbarous maritime subtribes are not so fastidious in their reasoning. Sustenance has been presented to them as though on a silver platter: there is really no need to equivocate.

As they approach the island stronghold (an ivory city, a gleaming metropolis), many of the boatpeople are forced to shield their eyes. The light that exudes from the fortress, reflected off its snowy walls, is for the majority too bright to bear. But for those lucky souls, squinting against the glare, whose vision is powerful enough to penetrate this heavenly radiance, a wondrous sight awaits: St. Peter himself, a towering figure perched aloft upon the battlements.

His beard is long and white. He cuts a majestic profile: solemn, regal, garbed in flowing robes. There is something terrible about his visage. He wears upon his face an expression unreadable by mortal beings. But the angelic hordes that throng the parapets know what is coming.

By now, the waves below are thick with boats. At the foot of heaven’s walls has collected a floating favela, a seaborne shantytown. The boatpeople, who from this Olympian height resemble ants in a bathtub, are in constant danger of being drowned or dashed against the ramparts. When a certain number of supplicants has collected, the fearsome saint raises his hand as though in greeting. The signal has been given; the angels’ machine-gun fire rips great gouges in the salty water.

3.

Rajesh hates poor people. He hates them with all his strength. No, I mean it. Pretty much every ounce of intellectual muscle in Rajesh’s body is devoted to his antipathy towards the less fortunate. He hates everything about them: their clothes, their accents, the smell of their cleaning products. Mostly he hates their poverty.

“Why?” one might ask. “What have the poor ever done to him?” The answer, of course, is “nothing.” Nothing at all. But it’s not really a matter of anything these benighted creatures might have done or failed to do. Rajesh has no interest in poor people’s actions. It’s their existence he can’t tolerate.

Rajesh is thirty-nine years old, teetotal, and almost excruciatingly mild-mannered until you get him onto the subject of pauperism. Then, his gentle computer-programmer’s features are transformed. He becomes animated, and his eyes light up with a revulsion that seems almost gleeful. Rajesh wears wire-framed spectacles with little circular lenses, and this sometimes leads people to mistake him for a pacifist. But when he gets into one of his moods, the effect is more Himmler than Gandhi.

Personally I can’t share in Rajesh’s odium. I have nothing in particular against poor people, as long as they don’t try to steal my wallet or rob my house. Nor do I have any real problem with the redistribution of wealth – though obviously I’d prefer it if my own wealth remained stationary. But Rajesh is different. His philosophy is callous, unyielding. Social Darwinism is for him an ersatz religion. Furthermore, he practises his faith with the zealous fury of the recent convert, frequently berating others for their inability to see the light.

We’re walking through the city centre on our way to the nearest branch of a popular global café-chain. It is two in the afternoon; we are on our lunch break. Rajesh and I work for different companies, but we perform the same function. Our job titles are identical, and our lunch breaks are often synchronized. On this particular lunch break, the sun is shining. It is a beautiful Spring day.

A beggar comes up to us – a wretched specimen. Bad skin, patchy beard, piteous expression. He approaches with outstretched hand, looking for all the world like a feudal serf about to prostrate himself before his lord. Without really thinking about it, I fumble around in my pocket for change, and then press a tarnished twenty-pence piece into the beggar’s grubby palm. As we walk away, Rajesh says:

“Why did you do that?”
I feign puzzlement. “Why did I do what?”
“You know it only encourages them.”
“What do you mean?”

Rajesh sighs deeply. I can feel a sermon coming on.

“The reason people beg for money,” he says, “is that they’re confident others will give it to them. When you give money to a beggar, you’re essentially validating a parasitic mode of existence – a way of life that is not only valueless but actually detrimental to society as a whole.”

We are approaching the café. The company logo, bold and instantly recognisable, can be seen from the far end of the street.

“I don’t follow,” I say.

Again, Rajesh sighs. His usual strategy in arguments is to become professorial, assuming the role of a teacher disappointed by his pupil’s persistent inability to understand. I find Rajesh’s affected weariness unconvincing. A faint gleam in his eye betrays him. I know how much he loves explaining his theories.

“Mendicants,” says Rajesh, “pose by their very existence a whole host of complex moral conundra, the simplest solution to which is to make a small donation. This enables the donor to feel good about himself, to cleanse his individual conscience whilst ignoring the wider processes at work.”
“Processes such as…?”
“Evolution. Survival of the fittest. Progress, in other words.”
“Right…”

We enter the café. Inside, a queue of thirty or so people stand waiting to get to the counter. Actually, it isn’t really a ‘queue’ in the traditional sense, but more of a swarm – a shifting mass, formless and amoebic. Rajesh and I attach ourselves to the periphery of the throng. There is a lapse in the conversation as the two of us scan the menu-boards: a pointless reflex, since we come here pretty much every day, and always order the same thing. Suddenly, Rajesh says:

“Give me your money.”
“What?”
“Give me your money.”

Reluctantly, I hand over a crumpled ten-pound note.

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“You’ll see,” says Rajesh. “Double crappuccino, right?”
“That’s right. And hold the soya.”

The crowd is growing more and more agitated. It is chiefly composed of white-collar worker drones, many of whom will shortly have to return to the corporate hive. The servers are doing the best they can, but there are simply too many people to take care of. The workers are impatient for their midday caffeine fix. It is hot and stuffy inside the café – difficult to breathe. A peasants’ revolt is imminent.

Rajesh takes a deep breath. “Cover me,” he says. “I’m going in.”

4.

Five minutes later, we are seated at a window-table in a couple of cushy leather armchairs that I managed to colonise whilst Rajesh was muscling his way towards the front of the queue. I take a cautious first sip of my coffee. It is as good as always: full-bodied, rich and aromatic, and served at exactly the right temperature.

“So,” says Rajesh, “where were we?”

A curious image haunts me: Rajesh’s skinny, shirt-clad back disappearing into a pulsing mass of pinstriped flesh. Plunging through that crowd of people, he looked like a plucky sherpa struggling against the flow of a swollen Nepalese river. He emerged several minutes later, glasses askew, clutching a chunky foam-topped mug in each hand. A broad grin dominated his face. He looked dazed yet triumphant.

“Survival of the fittest,”I say.

“Ah, yes,” says Rajesh, who after his momentary stint as a man of action is slipping back into a more familiar didactic role. “The survival of the fittest. Of course.”

Rajesh clears his throat. Ah-hem.

“Darwin’s theory,” he says, “which over the course of the last century or so has become accepted as fact by everyone but a small cabal of political regressives and religious nutjobs, holds that the evolution of a species – any species – proceeds via natural selection. In layman’s terms, this means that Nature in her infinite wisdom selects the hardiest and most hard-working specimens for reproduction, whilst consigning the weaker elements to the genetic wastepaper basket.”

“Yes,” I say: “evolution. So?”
“So when you interfere with this process, i.e. by donating money to help the weaker elements survive, you are interfering with the evolution of the species.”
“Yes, but – ”
“Ergo, the charity-giver is a traitor to the human race.”
“Right,” I say. “I see.”
Sometimes I think we’re all just so totally insignificant. Like bees. A bee on its own is nothing. No matter how hard it works, its labour produces very little that is worthwhile. A single bee: what real damage can it do? Its tail can leave a nasty sting, I’ll grant you. But the swelling, though painful, goes down in a matter of hours. The bee loses its life – and for what? Most of the time, the stinger doesn’t even leave a scar.

“You don’t look entirely convinced,” says Rajesh.

“That’s because I’m not,” I say.

The bee is not an individual, but part of a collective. Its life is meaningless outside of the hive. Likewise, I often get the feeling that our lives are, in the grand scheme of things, pretty inconsequential. The worker drone spends his whole life contributing to the hive, but his individual contribution is negligible. No matter what he does, he can’t see past the walls of his hexagonal workspace – his small, six-walled cell.

Rajesh is part of a vast corporation, with office in Paris, Tokyo, New York, Singapore. In Mumbai, hundreds of people whose skin-tone is similar to his sit in cubicles that match identically the one Rajesh uses in London. Sometimes they speak to each other via telephone. Each finds it hard to understand the other’s accent, and there is usually plenty of interference on the line. In this global age of communication, the human voices crosses continents in seconds, but distance can be distorting – and besides, how can you be sure that the person on the other end is listening? Really listening, I mean?

And the biggest riddles always seem to remain unsolved. Maybe its in their nature. Take the riddle we started out with: “Why does Rajesh hate poor people?” Are we any closer to solving it? I don’t think so.

It could be something in his upbringing. There’s a reasonable possibility that Rajesh’s parents (grandparents?) were poor when they came to this country – though they probably came on a plane or a ship rather than a floating tyre. Unfortunately, I can’t confirm this, because Rajesh has never told me much about his family. Our conversations tend to remain in the realm of the abstract, as this is where we technophiles feel most comfortable. All I know of my friend’s personal life is that he has a wife, Rita (which may or may not be an Indian name), who so far has borne him a son, Ravi (“sun”), and a daughter, Sita (“princess”). However, I like to imagine that Rajesh’s rather warped perspective on social issues is a way of distancing himself from his humble origins. For some reason, this makes me feel better about myself.

The simplest explanation I can think of is that Rajesh hates poor people because he’s afraid he might become one. As a formula, it’s far from perfect, but it’s the best I can come up with. Admittedly, the explanation doesn’t make sense in mathematical terms, for Rajesh is one of the most highly paid people I know – and deservedly so, I might add. No, the numbers don’t add up, but there’s a residual truthfulness there. At least, there is if we accept that the truth doesn’t always have to make sense in literal terms.

5.

This is all mere speculation, of course – speculation being the only course of action left open to me. Rajesh is no longer with us. He died over a decade ago, taking to the grave the solution to his personal riddle. I, too, am not long for this world.

The world, by the way, has taken a turn for the worst in recent years. Or rather several turns one after another. Each coming hard on the heels of the last, multiplying the damage exponentially. Once a planet gets on a downward slope – well, there’s precious little that can be done to save it. Our only hope now is for some kind of outside intervention: the benevolence of a hitherto unknown alien race. Charity, in other words. I’m not exactly holding my breath.

But I soon will be. The waters are rising, and some people have already started building life-rafts – often with materials stolen from their next door neighbour’s garden. I don’t think I’m going to bother. Drowning will be a release. I gather it’s rather peaceful, actually, as suicide methods go. In my dreams, the angels strap new ammo-belts to their machine-guns.

I think that I might die tomorrow.