Changing Landscapes

There was a four-decade old one-story house right next to where I live. With a pale green paint and a matching pale green banana tree at the back, it was not your modern city home. It was built for a different time; in fact, the backdoor opened into a well.  Where does one find city houses with wells these days?

The keen-eyed reader might have noticed that I started with “there was a”. A yellow-coloured machine drove in yesterday that reminded me of Bumblebee (from the Transformers movie) when a man climbed into it and started the mammoth drilling arm. With a few grunts, the machine roared to life and the drill swung around in one sweep motion to the parapet wall on the terrace.

It sounded like distant machine gun fire (remember the game Call of Duty?) for the next four and a half hours. Four and a half hours – that’s all it took to bring the four-decade old structure crumbling to the ground. Bumblebee didn’t care that the house was once a home, Bumblebee didn’t think about the old couple who had spent a solid 35+ years in that house, right from when they were young.

Bumblebee seems to have done a good job – knocked down walls lie among broken bricks, iron bars that once formed the ceiling protrude at all angles and the once 20 feet high structure is reduced to a pile of rubble.

A brand-new apartment block is to come up in this space - new walls, floors, fixtures, what not. As more and more older structures are torn down to make way for boxy new apartments, I doubt if anyone would know how the landscape changed few years down the line.Would I even recognize the street if I were to become frozen and wake up twenty years later in a Captain America-like scenario?