Short fiction: People wake up in a post-apocalyptic world to discover everything is made of cake

Cake art had appeared on the horizon just before the end of civilisation as we know it. They had begun making cakes in shapes and colours unimaginable so far. They were perfect replicas of things one would never have associated with cake or anything edible: jewellery, vehicles, mattresses, kanjeevaram silks, snakes, the kind of people who keep pet snakes, a child’s laughter, nostalgia, the infinite compassion of the world’s richest.

This cakey mess (resembling a party thrown for a Global Southern, nouveau-riche brat leaving for America to get a management degree) may have been more correlation than cause for the last strike of the hammer of Shiva to fall on the anvil of modern society, but the appearance of the cakey mess, on the horizon like UFOs (which were probably just cake), ensured the symbolism was stark. The downward slide of society was attributed to the discovery of fondant and the reckless mining of mountains and rainforests for the precious shapeshifting mineral that destroyed the tribes that worshipped it.

When the end came it was not with the spectacle and special effects of a high-budget, apocalyptic film – giant waves tossing ships like so many leaves in the sea, the tide rushing in to submerge entire cities, great fires engulfing the skyline, corpses and people about to become corpses thrown around in the chaos, alarms ringing, bells clanging, horns blaring with the drivers dead behind the wheel. The end arrived as unceremoniously as a kitchen accident: a pot of hot stew that slipped from the hands and shattered on the floor leaving broken chinaware and boiling blobs all over the kitchen. Nothing more serious than a lost dinner and a bloody mess to clean – something annoying, but not unfixable. But a closer look shows that the pot landed on the cat. Knocking, if not burning, it dead, and the sprayed stew fell on the blender’s faulty electrical connection causing a short circuit in the house’s wiring and starting a fire that destroyed everyone, and everything, in its wake.

The cake in the oven being ruined and the evening’s birthday party being cancelled is only one way of looking at a home gone up in smoke. This is what they would call it on a news show by a media house belonging to the oven company perhaps. Fortunately, the media house had burned down too – with everyone inside. Thus, one was spared “perspectives” on truth.

And that is when I entered the new reality with only my senses to guide me and every story-making mechanism vanished from the world. Like a newborn baby without the faculty of judgement, I had to build a new system of information, knowledge, opinions and prejudices entirely on my own. It took me a while to realise I was the sole survivor of, if not the whole world, certainly, my immediate surroundings. I sat there stunned as if recovering from a blow to the head. Perhaps the blow had anesthetised me to whatever it is that had destroyed civilisation as I had known it. My knowledge of it was already fading when I came to my senses and I felt a strong urge to begin to know civilisation differently. I had memories; some vivid, some vague but they were not enough to give me the whole picture of the devastation. I knew my name and age and gender and that sort of thing. I remember there had been a terrible disease that had swept through the world with an impunity that outmatched that of humans. “Human lives are being lost in numbers similar to those of animals in slaughterhouses across the world for the first time since industrialisation,” one news story had claimed. I didn’t recall losing anyone I knew. Perhaps I was the one who had died and my spirit had fetched up in this strange place?

I remembered I had parents – their faces were fairly clear – and I had an estranged sibling whose name nor features I could recall, try as I may. I remembered I had an “un-Googleable” ex, because he had a famous cousin behind whose surname he hid on the internet. But I think the shared last name may have been a coincidence and being related to him was probably one of the hundreds of lies he told me. But I didn’t remember my ex’s name – just the elaborate story around it. And I didn’t remember where I was. I looked around me and found the place entirely unfamiliar. It was a small, but neat, house with a bedroom, a hall and a tiny kitchen. There was a bathroom with a shower, a toilet, a wash basin, and black floor and wall tiles that gave the bathroom a cave-like appearance, in spite of two powerful lightbulbs. There was a bed, a small desk with a wooden stool, and a bean bag as furniture. A meagre, but functional, collection of pots and pans, a single burner stove with a gas cylinder and a small fridge in the kitchen. The coconut shell ladle made me wonder if I was in Kerala although I wasn’t quite sure what Kerala was. I looked out of the window. I appeared to be on the side of a hill of some sort. The slope below the house was so steep that it looked like a sheer drop. But there was no naked soil anywhere. Everything was covered in thick vegetation. Below was a valley which had some buildings and many trees. The window panes had stickers saying ‘Keep Glass Closed Monkeys’ in bold letters. Was it a warning of, or for, monkeys? I looked at the mirror in the bathroom to see if I was a monkey. I wasn’t. I looked exactly as I had before the end of civilisation as I had known it. I suddenly felt very lonely. I could do with company – any company. Even monkeys. I opened the windows and peered out. There were no monkeys. Perhaps this was not the time they appeared. I kept the window open for a monkey if it chose to visit.

I felt hungry. I went into the kitchen to see if there was something I could eat. There wasn’t anything except for a few mouldy biscuits and a bunch of bananas long past their prime. I picked them up and tossed them out of the window into the valley below.

Before I could sit down and wait for memory to find its way back into my mind and give me a few clues as to my whereabouts, I had to eat, for which I would have to go out and find food. I didn’t know where or how but if the place I was in was similar in any way to the only world I had known, food could be bought. But did I have any money? I looked around and found a wallet with a few strange-looking banknotes with writing in a language I did not recognise and a picture of someone or the other. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. A monarch? Freedom fighter? First president? Who cares! The grumbling in my stomach was threatening a chorus, and I stuffed the wallet into the back pocket of my jeans and walked out.

The ground was slippery and moss-covered. The valley lay below me but when I looked up, I saw I was closer to the top of the hill than the bottom. I wasn’t sure what I could find up there. But if not a café or a shop selling food, I could at least get a better view of the area, I thought. So, I decided to climb up rather than down.

I didn’t have to go far. There were rough stone steps on the hillside and when there were no steps, the dirt was firm and easy to walk on in my trainers – the only pair of shoes I found in the house. Soon, I arrived on a landing and found a pukka road winding around the hill. I followed the road uphill. There were houses poking through the greenery on both sides of the road. Luxury villas so silent, I wondered if I was deaf. But I could hear the wind through the trees. Strangely, there was no screeching hawk overhead that one would expect to accompany a scene like this. I surprised myself with the expectation – for someone who had woken up with most of their memory erased as the sole survivor of some kind of cataclysmic event, I seemed to possess the most random cinematic fiddle-faddle. I was either in a rich tropical country or one in which rich expats spent the winters away from their adoptive temperate countries.

Excerpted with permission from ‘Alone at Last’ in Gooday Nagar, Maithreyi Karnoor, Westland.