The Secret - Alok Dasgupta (top e book reader .TXT) 📗

Anushuya woke up at the sound of the alarm. She looked up at the atomic clock on the wall opposite to her bed. It was 8:00 a.m. The date flashed in green – 14th August 2035 A.D., Sunday. Anushuya looked to her right. The huge screen was unlit, only a pale blue light filled the room. She picked up the remote control and punched out a combination. Soon the screen lit up. It filled with a scenery of snow-capped mountains. The room brightened up as it automatically adjusted to the screen’s luminance.

Anushuya lived with her parents in flat no. NEBULA 2X in GEODESIC DOME No. 5 like many other families. Anushuya did not know how many domes where there but understood that there were many where different people lived or worked. These domes were connected by tunnels. These were the roads. The tunnels had  travelators or moving pavements which everybody used for going from place to place. The pavements moved in both directions and had different tracks each having different speeds. One could step onto the appropriate foot disc of the track that one chose at the Interchange Carousel and travel through the tunnel effortlessly.

Anushuya had never gone outside the domes. The outside world was forbidden to everybody who lived in the NEW EARTH ZONE, like Anushuya. She had learnt in school that the outside world was not fit for living. The air was thick and black. It carried all kinds of poisonous elements and gases that could kill just about everything or everybody. The sky was always overcast and grey. The outside world stood barren now. The people had therefore constructed the domes and had catered to all their requirements inside them. They grew their food inside the agri-domes, had their playgrounds, parks, fountains, pools as well as their office space, labs, schools, houses and departmental stores. The scientists were very clever and intelligent. Through experimentation they could produce all the gadgets and machines that would meet their requirements. Anushuya was proud of her father. He was the scientist who had designed the large screen like the one that glowed in Anushuya’s room. It could be adjusted to create eight sceneries. Everybody had such screens in their houses. The domes did not have windows because there was nothing to look outside; the pollution had destroyed everything.

Anushuya got out of her ergonomically designed pneumatic bed. The moment she got out, the bed automatically deflated and tucked itself into a niche in the wall. This was one of those many handy creations of the scientists who worked continuously to make life easier and comfortable. Anushuya stepped into the water chute and prepared herself for a nice body-wash. Before letting the water touch her skin, she selected her choice of combination on the digital touch-screen that set the water temperature, bath type and the angles of the 34 Jacuzzi shower nozzles in the chute. She put on a mask and a cap made out of a special material. Her father had once told her that these would protect her hair as well as protect her from swallowing the water as it contained chemicals acting as disinfectants to disinfect her body from various germs and diseases. Not all people could afford such a supply. It was only the rich like her father who had special permission of using it and they did not want to take any chance of contamination or disease. Whatever the facts, the shower was indeed refreshing.

It was almost 4:00 p.m. when Anushuya sat down to do her school assignment. For Anushuya school assignments were time consuming. Today, she had to write an essay on an uncommon topic. She spoke firmly to start her voice-activated personal computer. She flicked through the digital library searching for a lead. Finding nothing interesting there, she then switched over to the Inter-Dome-Network and started surfing. Suddenly there was a flash of white light and then the screen went blank. Anushuya was taken aback. This had never happened before. She stared at her PC in astonishment. She tried to gaze through the monitor as if to check for any malfunctioning of the circuits. She thought of video-phoning her father and showing him the problem. He was a scientist, after all - he might be able to fix it. But before she could even react to this idea, a faint green light flickered on the monitor. Slowly it took the form of a sentence. Anushuya leaned forward. She read “PRESS A KEY TO ESTABLISH CONTACT”. Anushuya got curious. Her curiosity had reduced the reaction time so much that she was not even aware as to when her finger moved up and pressed a key. She had no idea of what she did was right or not; moreover after committing such an action, she was too afraid to summon her parents for help. The monitor slowly filled out with a bright picture of a meadow. A message came over the screen. Anushuya bent over in excitement to read it. The message read “HI, THIS IS TRIPTI FROM THE OLD EARTH ZONE”. Old Earth Zone?! Anushuya had heard about it before. She remembered that her father had once told her that previously all people lived together. But some like him had differences with others and had moved out. Thus the NEW ZONE was established. This zone consisted of the scientists' community and their supporters who wanted to increase their knowledge and had the urge of discovering new things. The others talked of reducing their needs and having a balance among all things. The scientists thought that this might affect their innovativeness and hamper their inventions. Nobody made any contacts with the OLD ZONE, anymore.

Anushuya did not know how she managed to make contact with Tripti, but she was very glad and did not want to end the contact. They started to chat. Tripti told Anushuya about her world, how they went on holidays to the mountains or the sea. Tripti talked about the forests they had, the animals in the forests. She talked about the climate, the sunshine, the rains and the storms. As she chatted, Tripti flashed video clips of her world. Anushuya learnt that Tripti had a garden in front of her home where there were many flowering plants. She had a pet rabbit and a macaw.

Anushuya felt sad and ashamed. In spite of all the latest gadgets she had, Anushuya felt that she had nothing much to talk about and show except for the huge domes and their equipments. She had nothing of the things that Tripti mentioned. Anushuya realized that once they also had everything- the birds, the animals, the flowers, the mountains, sea and the forests. They also had sunshine like the way Tripti described. But now they had lost everything to pollution. The scientists went on inventing. They were engrossed in their work so much that they hardly had the time think about their responsibilities or of their surroundings and the environment. The more they invented, the more the people’s demands grew. There was no end to it. It was like a vicious circle. The toxic and other wastes produced killed the plants, polluted the water bodies and soon all the animals and plants became extinct. The trees died due to release of poisonous gases in the air. Now oxygen had to be created to feed the domes. One had to wear a mask and body-suit to venture outside the dome. The people got so selfish and greedy that they thought only about themselves. Their sources became limited, all the animals died. Caring for the animals and trees were costly and a waste of time for them. It was cheaper to artificially produce them. In this process they had created so much pollution that nothing survived except for them because they came indoors to protect them from this situation - which was no less than a nuclear holocaust, they started living in the domes.

Anushuya thanked Tripti and promised to try and contact her again before she shut off her computer. She realized that it was about time that she completed her assignment. She made herself cozy in her bed with her voice recorder in her hand. She was comparing Tripti’s jolly life and her world - her dull life. Then something clicked in her mind. She now knew what to write for her essay. She would write about SUNSHINE using what she just learned from Tripti. She knew everybody in school would be surprised and would ask her how she came up with such an essay. Anushuya would never say it, not even to her parents or best friend. It was a secret - a secret shared only between her and Tripti.

Publication Date: 09-13-2011

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