Shumi was flying. Save for a scarlet slash of cloth across her hips, she was naked and she didn’t care. With the certainty of dream knowledge she knew that bare skin was necessary to allow a seamless control of the air flow over her wings and body.
Turning her dream-tunnelled vision left and then right, she gazed at her wings—arching painlessly upwards, two pure silver impossible arcs propelled her wheeling progress above the endless, glittering scintilla of the Dhakan canalways. A glance down along her prone, airborne form showed her a body rippling with flexing, metallic auxiliary remex feathers, providing both lift and directional control. There was no time (or space) for disbelief; the dream was at once both completely real and utterly strange.
A tiny part of her mind was aware that she was skirting the thermal above the downtown desalination plant, and without conscious thought she leant into the vast column of warm rising air (using another strange sense that she cared not to analyse) to guide her into the most efficient route upwards. As she gained altitude the silver tributaries of the Dhakan canals fractalized, coalescing into a larger picture of the Ganges delta: a beautiful, delicate decayed leaf outline that disguised the gigatonnes of effluent and top soil erosion that washed endlessly from South East Asia into the Bay of Bengal.
From here she could not see the deforestation, or the poverty, or the exploitation, and the air had retained a rare early morning clarity that sang through her wings. Always visible though was the perfect circular pox scar of the impact crater: from two kilometres up, she could see the new growth of reclamation efforts, but ten years of work and febrile life had made little impact in the gargantuan bite out of Dhaka.
Topping out at 2,500 meters, the thermal spat her out above the light cloud cover into a gelid, golden space of dazzling morning sunlight. Effortlessly trimming and tweaking fingertip flight feathers, she deep-rolled back towards home; it was time for school…
Waking hard and gummy into the grey, humid morning light, Shumi groaned at the grief of loss; instead of the warm ethereal silk of air on her body there was only the raspy UNAID surplus blanket, still smelling faintly of the chewed and woven plastic bottles that gave up their lives for a developing-world recycling effort. Her waking transitions were always difficult. She never dreamed lightly, for her each night was an involuntary excursion into a fully realised world, each with its own challenges, terrors, and joys. One of her sense-blunted Western peers might achieve the same effect with a Sony Haptic rig, but Shumi just felt like she had two jobs to do: an eighteen hour waking world of exhaustion, and a night time lottery of immersion. Lying for a few moments on her narrow cot, Shumi mustered energy for the day ahead, the silvery threads of Dhaka from altitude still clear in her mind’s eye. The rivers were always there in her dreams, sometimes swollen and torrential, in others merely dusty wadis with barely a trickle of water, but always the rivers.
She irritably shrugged off the cloying tendrils of the dream and got her day face on. Duty called and Shumi always obeyed. Polished black shoes, shiny Lilliputian scarab beetles, laces just so. Grey wool longshorts—three days wear, a fading crease, two little stains… they’ll do. A hypnotically bright white shirt, plastic fresh and polymer perfumed. Her best tie, Friday’s socks, clean teeth—it’s time.
Shumi Majumdar had a job to do, no one else was going to do it, and a lot of people were relying on her. Shumi is a teacher, she is twelve years old, and her school has over fifty pupils.
Breakfast was the normal frantic, dim fumble in the half-light of the early Dhakan morning, the chick-like cawing of her hungry brothers, sated with butter-fried flat bread and milked cooled in the damp earth under the plywood floor of her home. School started at eight o’clock sharp (no excuses!), and Shumi liked to be early; her youngest brother Antu delighted in goading and thwarting her punctuality, his piping seven-year old voice prodding and teasing from the moment she opened her eyes in the damp morning gloom. She never berated him though, only the gentlest chide with a roster-last serving of breakfast, or a mildly sadistic hair brushing—Antu got a pass because of the Deal.
The Deal has never been spoken—proper planning was for the time-rich and comfort enabled. The Deal has never been written down, only Shumi can write, and a child’s intuitive poverty-born censorship meant that she knew that whatever was tangible could be stolen. The Deal was never discussed; in a world of perpetual uncertainty the instant tradition of a shared, unspoken secret was the Majumdar family shield.