Notes from a dusty city

When I first arrived here I was mildly disgusted by the thin film of yellow-brown dust that covered the screen and keyboard of the laptop I had inherited from my predecessor. But several months in and I have realized the futility of cleaning the thing on a daily basis. When I open it up in the office each morning the dust is there again, fine and clogging. Where does it come from? Over the course of each day in the office and evenings spent emailing, checking the news or watching DVDs, the dust must pile up, be swept into the air by fans and the occasional cool breeze and settle gently over everything. The whole city in fact is dusty. The earth, where it is visible despite the tarmac and concrete, is packed down and dry. The wind sweeps the fine top layer into corners, piles it up at the sides of the road and deposits it on the floor of our flat when the windows are open. The roadside is often like sand; soft and gritty underfoot.

On Tulsi Row the tarmac eventually gives way completely to the dusty earth, which blows into the parking space underneath the flats to obscure the circular patterned floor tiles with a gritty covering. Nearer Jodhpur Gam Road the tarmac remains and in the morning sweepers brush the dust and grit off to the right and left of the road, their brooms leaving fine lines in the sandy spaces where cars usually park in an orderly row. There is a futility in this labour also, the women in once brightly-coloured saris scraping the fine earth and sending up clouds of yellow-brown dust that settle roughly in the same as before. And these efforts pale in comparison to nature’s. When it rains, as it did recently to the surprise of everyone in the city because the Monsoon is not due until the end of June at least, all the accumulated dust is washed away. The roads and pavements are visible as intended and, washed clean, look sharper at the edges but more dilapidated, as potholes, cracks and the effects of slow erosion are revealed as if magic.