Translated fiction: Gyan Chaturvedi’s novel about the free-market economy and excessive consumerism

The suburbs were flooding.

The Bazaar was everywhere. Quite an embarrassing time this was.

It was a flood. Life was surrounded by the Bazaar, everywhere. It was the Bazaar that was flowing everywhere. Laughter, conversation, day-to-day dealings among people, literature, culture, folk, religion, thought, and music – everything was flowing with the flow of the Bazaar.

Since this was a flood, the suburbs should have been scared, right? People should have gathered everything they could find and moved on to a safer place, right? But such was the bizarre nature of these times that instead of panicking and getting scared, people in the suburbs were celebrating the flooding. The Bazaar kept on expanding. Flooding works on this principle. When it spreads, it swallows everything that comes in its way. The Bazaar had spread so far and so fast that the places which didn’t even have a market were under its sway now. But nobody was concerned with this. Rather, suburbs were enjoying all of this, and everybody was happy.

The Bazaar had barged into the suburbs, which were flooding. Everybody in the suburbs was cheering and enjoying this from the sidelines, thinking that this was just another dog and pony show. And then the Bazaar rose higher. The floodwaters started rising faster and faster. The first ones to fall prey were the innocent bystanders to all of this. Then, the streets fell; and soon, neighbourhoods, too, fell prey to that. The suburbs were next to go. Roads. Doorsteps. Doors. If somebody could see this from a satellite in space, he would have been scared to see all of this happening. Everything was getting flooded. Everywhere, it was the Bazaar and only the Bazaar. Houses were getting flooded. Personal relationships were the first to dissolve. Friendships found themselves neck-deep in the muddy waters. The sludge of billboards, hoardings and advertisements had seeped into every house. Houses had lost their identity. Wherever you looked, you only saw the Bazaar.

The waves were sky-high. When they came, everybody would be ecstatic to see them. And man! In the beginning, this was an attraction in itself for lots of people!

The common folks in the suburbs also thought of this as a new game. In the beginning, they sloshed and ran around a lot, playing in the floods’ rising waters. They started organising water sports in these waters. They started celebrating the flood. Some elders were alarmed; and they cautioned, saying that these waters are not to be played in or played with. When it starts flooding, the first thing to do is to head for the hills. Save your houses and homes. Save yourself. But people didn’t listen. They started making fun of these elders. They started making and sharing jokes and funny memes about the elders on WhatsApp, Facebook, and other social media, which went viral. And then this, too, happened that others started advising these thinker types to let go of worries about flooding and, in fact, told them to change themselves and start going with the flow and not worry about the flood. Everybody started convincing everybody else in favour of the flood. They said that it was the Bazaar’s magnificent arrangement that now things are sold to you right at your doorstep. “All you have to do is whisper and they will deliver things to you at your doorstep, and that too at a significant discount – what else does one need? See, now we don’t have to go to a riverbank to get water. The river has come to our doorsteps…and here you are, crying foul about the flooding! Tell me, have things been so easy in the world ever before? Go, on!”

But gradually, when this ankle-deep water started rising and became waist-deep, then few other folks – who were celebrating this spectacle until now were concerned. But others cornered these people as well, and allayed their fears by saying that this wasn’t a grave danger. Especially if one learns to swim and float with the tide, things become a lot easier and navigable. So there is nothing to lose one’s sleep over. But while this was going on, the flood water had risen to such a level that it was now in people’s homes. Everybody’s home was looking like a makeshift shop. The home itself was homeless now.

And then, with time, floodwater rose higher and higher. People started climbing onto rooftops. Market-friendly folks still soothed everybody’s fears by saying that if only one could get accustomed to this minor discomfort of living on the roofs, this barging in of the Bazaar into our lives would eventually turn out to be a good thing overall. Nobody dared to ask these wise market-friendly folks what would happen to the suburbs if the waters rose higher than the rooftops.

So – when everybody was already on rooftops and every single household was now in the grips of the Bazaar – this is a story of those times. This is the story of the world completely drowning in the Bazaar.

Excerpted with permission from The Madhouse: Pagalkhana, Gyan Chaturvedi, translated from the Hindi by Punarvasu Joshi, Thornbird/Niyogi Books.