The Old Age Home at The End of The Universe
Photo: Karan Madhok
Short Story: ‘She will not know the scent of freshly sown grass, the fragrance of blooming flowers, the sound of breaking waves, the songs of birds, the hymns of cicadas, the taste of ripening mangoes, the warmth of the earth. She will never know her home like me.’
This story is excerpted from the collection Fractral Dreams That Unmake (Red Herring, An imprint of The Antonym Collections, 2025) by Soham Guha. These fifteen stories, ranging from science fiction, fantasy, and horror, encompass elements, cultural context, history, and people of the subcontinent.
“The Old Age Home at the End of the Universe” explores what happens to old parents left behind by their children in a dying world.
*
The mechanoid maid put a single candle on the cupcake and sang the birthday song in its mechanical monotone. Despite my protests, it had printed a cake for my birthday. Being a part of its programming, it did not know why I reacted. It kept singing until I blew the candle and saw the drift of the faint smoke running towards the ventilator above. This part was preprogrammed in its systems so that we don’t forget the histories—our personal histories—we carry on our aching shoulders. I felt the tasteless synthesized bread on my tongue, and a tear escaped my eye. “Happy Birthday,” I wished myself.
There was a framed photograph near my bed. It was a miracle that it survived the turmoil, a whole year, in my coat pocket. In an ideal world, the people in the photograph would have stood beside me, congratulating me on the good life I had lived so far.
The ideal world is now a fable adrift in the cosmos. I looked at the photograph; my son, his wife, and my granddaughter smiled at me. They should have crossed Alpha Centauri by now.
Amala Bose saw me looking blankly at the photograph, lost in the flow of old memories and chewing the cupcake slowly. She came near, holding her supportive cane in one hand. “How can you celebrate your birthday and not invite me?” She asked with a smile.
“I didn’t know this date, for the seventy-fourth time, still matters,” I responded. She was the mind behind the programming of the maids, and in a time like this, it mattered. She always did trivial things to make us happy.
Anarchy spread like wildfire in the ‘City of Joy.’ Frequently, explosions were heard from corners of this urban jungle. The hospital was locked down. I saw the beginnings of our world’s end through the glass windows. Despite its approach, this end felt like a whimper compared to what was coming.
“Happy Birthday, Anirban.” She came near and hugged me tightly in her soft, warm embrace. The tears that narrowly escaped my eyes until now flooded like the waters trapped behind a dam. I grabbed her tightly and wept. “They’ve forgotten me, Amala,” I said, my voice choked.
“Hush now.” She patted on my bald head. “Our children have forgotten us altogether. Yours is not a solitary incident.”
It makes me wonder and admire her more. Her daughter died during the riots in between the migrations. How can she still pull herself off the bed every morning, order the maid to give her a caffeine pill, and put on a smile that occasionally stretches into a grin? How can someone more broken than I still stand firm?
*
A decade ago, when the International Astronomical Union declared that the neutron star Bismuth was on a collision course with our planet, my son and I sat in a hospital reception, waiting for my granddaughter’s arrival. We did not hear the news that changed the world until she was born. Her first cries and our joyous shouts muffled everything.
When I went outside the hospital for a quick smoke, I discovered the crowds were afraid. Buses, trucks, and cars were burning on the streets of Kolkata. Someone yelled in the background, “Run. The world is ending.” The fear reached me too. I ran inside and locked the cabin given to us. We waited for the day to pass. My granddaughter sucked her mother’s breasts for milk and then slept through the night. There were no electric lights to illuminate the city. Yet, it was not covered in the dark. Our city bled through her numerous fresh wounds. The cars were burning; some houses were, too. The supermarkets and malls were ransacked, and the banks were looted. Anarchy spread like wildfire in the ‘City of Joy.’ Frequently, explosions were heard from corners of this urban jungle. The hospital was locked down. I saw the beginnings of our world’s end through the glass windows. Despite its approach, this end felt like a whimper compared to what was coming.
At dawn, when the sounds finally gave way to an unnerving silence, the radio woke up with a government broadcast. They were calling in all their resources and prototype skeletons of intra-solar spaceships to create something called the Arks. Humanity will survive in Swarga space. I didn’t understand the ‘Project Orion’ or nuclear propulsion. I was only worried about my granddaughter. This was not the world I had envisioned for her. Unbeknownst to the conditions, she was the only one who slept soundly through the night.
My thoughts drifted away from the broadcast and towards her tiny, sleeping face. So little. So pure. Soon, she will be making a journey through the stars. She will see unknown realms mankind only dreamt of but be oblivious about many things. She will not know the scent of freshly sown grass, the fragrance of blooming flowers, the sound of breaking waves, the songs of birds, the hymns of cicadas, the taste of ripening mangoes, the warmth of the earth. She will never know her home like me.
I swore to make her remember all these.
They promised to call me whenever they would get the chance. I believed them. I did not know interstellar calls were impossible. I saw the carrying shuttles ascend through the clouds, leaving behind a faint trail of smoke, just like my birthday candle.
When the broadcast ended, I saw my son, my daughter-in-law, and the eight nurses who had taken shelter with us all looking at me. “What?” I asked hesitantly.
“I’m sorry, Papa,” my son cupped my hand.
“For what?” I was still in the dark.
“Didn’t you hear the broadcast? They will shortly begin to distribute the passes. The Thirty Arks were already in the works for a secret deep-space colonization mission. They can and will only accommodate seventy-four percent of the world population.”
I recalled that we had reached eleven billion some years ago. “What about the rest?”
“I’m sorry, Papa. But if the government sticks to their points, you won’t join us on the Arks. They said any person above fifty-five won’t be permitted to enter. They said they won’t entertain the Arks as old age homes.”
I devoted myself to being as close as possible to my granddaughter. Her first word was ‘Dadu’: Me. I narrated Saratchandra’s prose to her. I sang songs of Tagore for her. I collected all the photographs of us we had in physical format and asked my son to save them in their cloud accounts. I bought Hilsa and steamed the mustard-coated fish for them. I told her about the partition that divided our identities. I described India’s freedom movement to her that we walked in the shadow of giants. I collected cowries and made a chain using them as beads. “This world, my world, will not die with me,” I whispered every time hopelessness engulfed me. And again, I stood up so my granddaughter would not forget what home was meant to be. She was the jewel, the brightest star in an unknown constellation of my night sky.
*
Eight years later, I waved goodbye to them. I pulled myself away from her. When she came to know it was the last time she was seeing me, she erupted into tears. We both defined treason and heartbreaks in our terms. She struggled to get away from her parents. My face didn’t betray signs of heartache, and yet my hands clenched fists on my back, holding each other in a false embrace in vain and trying to recreate her soft touch. My daughter-in-law grabbed her tightly. My son grabbed my hands. “Thank you, Papa, for raising me,” he barely could say in his choked voice.
“It’s okay. Take care of them. And never forget the village near the Damodar where your mother raised you,” the tears reached me, too.
“I will never, Papa. Though lightyears will be between us, you will always be in my heart.”
They promised to call me whenever they would get the chance. I believed them. I did not know interstellar calls were impossible. I saw the carrying shuttles ascend through the clouds, leaving behind a faint trail of smoke, just like my birthday candle.
When I came down from the visitor’s room of the launchpad, removing the tear marks with the cuff of my shirt, someone tapped on my shoulder and said something in a soft voice that resembled the chirps of the songbirds. She looked into my eyes and said, “In the Andamans, we are setting up a community home. Would you like to join us? Would you like to feel the roots of your home planet for these last two years of the Earth?” She saw my cluelessness and added, “Oh, Anirban! Can’t you remember we shared the same classroom in our village? How can you forget the days we spent catching insects in the paddy fields, or the afternoons we stole fish from Ratan Kaku’s pond? It looks like I again have to smack on the head and restart your brain cells like the old days.”
Even with her paper-salt groomed hair and the age marks territorializing her face, her eyes were still the same. “Amala? Amala Bose?” I awkwardly asked.
I flew with her. Under my feet, the clouds over the Bay of Bengal looked like a foam carpet. Many shuttles still left the Earth to dock on the Arks near the moon. I saw the trails left by the shuttles appear like new twines of a banyan tree. After we landed on the makeshift runway of Havelock Island in the Andaman archipelago, a group of men and women—older or the same age as me—came to greet us. That night, we sat around a campfire on the lonely beach. The stars shone above our heads like diamonds of a forever lifespan. The sea went away with an ebb.
Around the campfire, all our tales of abandonment came out as stories of melancholia. Samuel Striker, the army doctor of Port Blair Hospital, told us about his work on a wild strain of poliovirus and his years devoted to tribal welfare. Shambhala Maiti looked at the fire and narrated her days in the slums of Kolkata. Akash Jain placed a piece of wood in the fire and asked if his life in the tanneries of Mumbai would be worth telling. Gurmit Singh talked about his days in the most significant robotics hub in the Indian subcontinent. Manjira Majhi’s fingers made circles in the sand; she did not think her life as ‘just a housewife’ would be worth telling.
Amala Bose was the only one who did not say a single thing. In the brilliance of the fire, I saw the ghosts of the past dancing in her eyes. Those faint structures dissolved quickly when I asked her what was wrong. Unlike ours, her future generation was not in the stars. Later, when we became more friends than acquaintances, under a midnight starry sky, she confessed that she left her husband as his decision had killed their only daughter. “If he didn’t send her back to her in-laws, she would still be alive. Up there.” Though she did not shed a single drop of tear, her dry and sinking voice said she was broken.
I told them why I named my granddaughter Basundhara—in Bengali; it meant my home planet. I found the last picture she drew of an alien world where she thought I was going among my things. I took it to the beach with me. Why? Maybe because our hearts work like miniature clockwork robots. When someone precious is taken away from us, it falls apart. I was angry that I did not get a second chance. I was afraid of dying.
We saw the simultaneous explosions; the outlines of thirty large cylindrical bodies appeared. The dark side of the moon illuminated with them. And soon, it was dark again. Our children abandoned us.
At midnight—and it was a night of the new moon—we looked upwards, at the place of the sky where the dark side of the moon looked at the earth. When the clock struck 12.15, the part of the sky exploded with green, blue, and yellow colors. We saw the simultaneous explosions; the outlines of thirty large cylindrical bodies appeared. The dark side of the moon illuminated with them. And soon, it was dark again. Our children abandoned us. I crumbled the drawing and buried it in the sand.
*
I looked at Amala and said, “What do you want me to do? In my younger days, plowing the earth all day long on my field before the monsoon was routine. But now, my bones are brittle, my blood cold, and my heart unenthusiastic. What do you even expect?”
Amala parted her lips to a content beam. “Anirban, yesterday, during a stroll on an unused trail, some of us came across a concrete structure that probably was used as an emergency shelter during tropical storms and tsunamis. There, we found grains of wheat, paddy, gram, and even tur seeds. None of us expect you to be bestowed with the knowledge of irrigation, soil, and cultivation. Our tongues are so sore by eating printed food every day! We all want to eat what we used to in childhood.”
I asked in worry, seeing the mischief of a young girl dancing on her face, “What did you scheme this time? Who are we?”
Excitedly, She stretched her arms, and her cane fell on the ground, “The whole community, Anirban.” Since the last month, her liveliness had doubled. When almost everyone was counting the days, she collected old DVDs and a player to run them from Port Blair. She also dragged Samuel and me to the mainland in search of necessary medicines, clothes, supplies, and whatever else she thought could not be printed. When we returned in our high-speed rafts, with Samuel at the wheel, she went to the open deck and inhaled the moist wind. And somehow, it touched us. We had left the castes, the surnames, the socioeconomic divisions to our children. It had no worth here. We watched explicit films and dramas side-by-side. We read erotic literature aloud and laughed about the wild content. We bathed in the sea, sporting swimsuits we could not imagine wearing in normal circumstances. We used curse words more freely. We ate crabs, coconut, and roasted fish. We became sick, and our washroom visits became more frequent. But not for a moment, we let the inevitable chill sink into our bones. We defined the meaning of living before the final sunset.
*
It was May, and the monsoon was expected to arrive only half a month later. I was taken aback by the conditions of the stored grains. Not only were they good-grade materials, but they were also of pristine quality. I thanked the people who left them here and asked Amala, “Is there a tractor on the island?”
“Nope. But we can make things work. Right?” Her eyebrows danced.
I want to believe that all of these are an elaborate fantasy, that a prosperous civilization—full of men, women, and children—still exists outside this island, that my son and daughter-in-law will greet me with open arms when I knock on the front door of that rented house where we all lived together.
The cultivable land of Havelock was a bare minimum. I found suitable terrain close to Kala Pathar Beach. Akash Jain joked when I told him about my finds, “It feels strange, seeing how self-sustained we are now. A quarter-century ago, the Indian government renamed Havelock Swaraj Dweep in honour of Netaji. However, it is only now that the name is justified. Aren’t we now the citizens and the masters of this new island nation?”
I protested, “Akash, this place wasn’t a part of India until our colonial masters came to rule us. We called this unknown territory Kalapani. Black Waters. What remained beyond it was the edge of our universe. Though once we made the whole Bay of Bengal our naval pond, we now dare to venture outside our comfort cocoons. This place and its inhabitants were aliens to us. Now we are here: old, forsaken people to see the fate of the world and eat rice from the front row seat.”
Akash nodded, “I wish I were here, on this tropical island, when I was young or still had the time.”
*
When the monsoon arrived with its first rain, my sown field gave birth to numerous cotyledons. Once upon a time, Amala brought us the mechano-maids from her mainland labs. She used to be a leading name in the tech giant that pioneered and later monopolized robotics manufacturing in India. Though the machines were made for domestic purposes, partly keeping in mind the extensive care for the elderlies, on my request (read: nagging), she and Gurmit Singh made new programs for the mechano-maids. They repurposed some of them as ‘Farmer Bots,’ my helping hands in the field. The bots plowed the earth with utter efficiency. I couldn’t do the heavy work at this age.
The scent of the moist earth took me back almost half a century, to my village, where my mother used to fan me and my wife used to serve me rice, curry, and dal in the afternoon when I returned from the field, all drenched in sweat. I would savor the dishes like a barbarian to tame my growling stomach. It was hard to make both ends meet back then. And yet, we were content and happy. We are so distant from nature these days that we forget what it means to be alive and human. I remembered the taste of their cooking, and it instantly salivated my mouth. I allowed the rain to soak me with its wet offerings and let us borrow the gifts it brought into this land. The world would vanish in five months, and I still found it hard to believe. Whenever this happened, thoughts churned in my mind.
What defines us—all our history, our culture, our stories of love and despair, wars and peace, carnage, and kindness, our marks in this distant corner of the universe—will vanish. The star, barely more significant than the moon, will engulf everything like a hungry devourer. I want to believe that all of these are an elaborate fantasy, that a prosperous civilization—full of men, women, and children—still exists outside this island, that my son and daughter-in-law will greet me with open arms when I knock on the front door of that rented house where we all lived together. I want to believe all this. And yet, I can’t. Amala has set a telescope on the east veranda of her cottage. Each day, after sunset, she calibrates its angle with the earth’s rotation and revolution. It is there to see only one thing constantly. A red dot near the southeast horizon. It becomes a bit bigger and brighter with each passing day. Like a bloodhound, it stalks the trail of our solar system and is rapidly catching up. Gravity attracts.
*
During the monsoon, we encountered members of the Jarawa tribe. When Samuel and I came forward to greet them, we noticed that, unlike us, they were not only a group of old people. We saw the children and adults. No one was as old as us. The Jarawas had lesser life expectancies. Seldom did one of them cross 40. Samuel was good in their tongue. He asked their leader, “Why didn’t they take you?”
Disparity and outrage can be sensed in a man’s voice, speaking an unknown language. I felt it in the leader’s voice. The tribes on these archipelagos were here before the first city of the Indus Valley was erected. Isolated and stranded, they lived on these islands for millennia, unknown, leading a life prosperous on their terms. Then we came here with our colonial masters and transformed this place as we saw fit. Though we shared the same anatomical structures, we never considered them humans because we were not accustomed to their ways. We cleared their forest, built roads, and erected habitations in their lands, and whenever they tried to protest, we brought them down with iron fists. We came here with our imposing cultural pollutants, our bacterial and viral contagions, our narcotic obsessions, and our eternal greed. We forced our civilization onto them without considering what it meant to be civilized. The Sentinelese put up a barrier; the Onges, the Sampans, and the Jarawas succumbed to our unstoppable development pressure.
The Jarawa leader said (Samuel told me later), “Unlike you, we are accustomed to being exploited and cast away. We understand the retreat of cowards and the obligations of selfish men. We didn’t come here for help. We are visiting all the places that are rightfully ours.”
Though the spaceships were called Arks, they were not made by Noah. They were meant to carry one species only—civilized men. Though we call ourselves Homo sapiens, I cannot comprehend what makes us wise. When they left Earth, they were so preoccupied with their escape that they took with them neither the flora and fauna, nor the people who made this planet their home much before we established civilizations. Indigenous tribes were deliberately left out. They were not human enough in front of their attired brothers and sisters. At my request, Samuel told them the whole truth.
“Havelock is a small island. There aren’t enough resources for all of us,” he said. “However, there is another abandoned island near the rising sun. It has a larger portion of cultivable land. Neal Island can become your new home. If you need anything, anything at all, just ask us.”
The Jarawa chief nodded strangely, spat on the sand, and said something to Samuel. From the side, I could only see Samuel’s face. It exhibited shame. The chief gestured to his people, and when they left the island in their strange makeshift boats, I asked Samuel, “What did he say?”
Samuel wore a mournful smile. “The chief said that they should have taken the way of isolation like the Sentinelese when they were the master of these lands. He said our civilization is nothing but the poison of a cunning snake. This whole place was their motherland, and we drove them away. Now, when the world is ending, we boast of our loftiness and greatness by giving the same places back to them as an aid. They don’t need the generosity of our civilization to be civilized. They will always accept us as invaders. They are glad that our world is ending because we ended their world a few centuries ago.”
*
Autumn came, and the paddy and dal fields were ready to be harvested. Under the glimmer of the sun, they moved with the sea breeze like waves of cold and snow. I sat near the field, facing the sea, and let the cold, moist winds greet me too.
The neutron star will make planetfall in eighteen days, like the eighteen days it took to end the Kurukshetra war. The war changed the course of India’s mythological foundation and marked the end of a grand dynasty. Like Kurukshetra, these eighteen days will also mark the end of an era, the era of men. Yes, humans will survive in space; they will colonize a distant world, placed in the area Amala called the Goldilocks Zone, revolving around an alien sun. But I doubt they will ever be humans again. Though they will neither differ in appearance with us nor in their inner makings, what will vary is the anatomy of the mind.
Often, I speculated how it would be any different in any other world. Because the past is a baggage, we carry the sins of our fathers on our shoulders. They left us here to die because we were that baggage.
Talks often sprouted between me and Amala as the scientific terms were difficult to understand. My wife died almost forty years ago after giving birth to my son. And yet, after the eclipse of humanity, I found the crimson sunsets glamorous. Amala always sat on the beach to see the sight, and the glow of the last rays washed her face. During the community meetings, I brought up my progress in the fields. Amala showed us that the distortions in the Kuiper Belt were accelerating. After the meeting ended, I sat beside her on the sand and asked, “What does that mean?”
Instead of answering, she gave me a strange look, “Why don’t you find the greater knowledge of a woman emasculating?”
I was taken aback, “Amala, you were the best in our class, and if I recall correctly, you took the first place on the engineering entrance exam. After that…”
“After that, you were told I was a shameless girl because I wanted to pursue my career rather than marry a man without choice. Am I right?”
I did not know what to say. I nodded slowly. She turned towards me and said, “Anirban, we lived in the epitome of a defective patriarchal society, where though the freedom of women was well-known , it was never fully acknowledged.”
“But many women achieved many things….”
“My dear Ani’, they were all city girls, brought up in somewhat modern and prosperous households. The ideas could not penetrate rural India. That is why I ran away.” For the first time, tears escaped her eyes. She rubbed them and said, “Why am I crying now? I fell in love with a literature professor, but in the end, he was also a man just like my father. Why is it so hard to desire something for your own in this country? Is it because I am a woman? Just because I’m a woman? Many girls were born in this country, but only a few were allowed to become women… Forget that,” she ended with a resilient tone, “forget everything I told you. Because none of that matters anymore.” I wanted to embrace her and tell her I was by her side. Somehow, I did not. I sat by her side and saw the sun sinking under the sea.
What makes us human? We were born in this world to be one. It was shaped by the socioeconomic and geographic locations of our parents and their cultural heritage. I am a Bengali because of the inheritance of artistic and intellectual anchors defined and taught by my parents and society. Ethnic segregation provoked religious affairs and extremist nationalism induced violence throughout our history. Often, I speculated how it would be any different in any other world. Because the past is a baggage, we carry the sins of our fathers on our shoulders. They left us here to die because we were that baggage. In their eyes, we were not productive anymore. A computer system does a reboot. For the first time in history, an organic system did so.
*
The earth has a womb, like the sky has a roof, and both were in a collision course. The taste from my unfinished plate was still on my lips.
“What happened? Why aren’t you eating?” Amala asked me in a calm voice.
“I was thinking about my family. I hope nothing ominous has befallen to their journey.”
“A parent’s neural instincts; if someone of mine were up there, I would think so too. We try to grab onto our children’s shoulders for support, often forgetting that, with time, they have become distant. What matters now is what we achieved; truthfully, you did a splendid job in the fields. The dish is quite tasty. Shambhala is a splendid cook.” She raised a spoonful of curry and rice to me and consumed it. The rice came from my fields, the spices were found in the storm shelter, and the chicken pieces and eggs came from hens Manjira had reared just for this occasion. Samuel had caught some marine fish with his mechano-maid.
Any moment now…
Under the clear sky, an intense westward wind raced over the island. With it, a strong ebb was born right before us. The other side of the planet faced Bismuth when it passed the moon’s orbit. As Gurmit postulated, the gravitational force was destroying Earth’s atmosphere. A continuous mild quake shook the ground beneath us, as if we were standing on a construction site. If this was a localized incident, I might have run for shelter. Though afraid, I found myself surprisingly calm. Deep in my heart, I realized we could not outwait this disaster in these two short yet lively years. We will fall into the sky, and the star will swallow us.
The sea disappeared; up to the horizon, all I saw was the dried ocean basin. The tremors intensified. A strange sky of violet and red quickly consumed the standard blue. The coconut and palm trees along the beach were shaking with the winds like whips. I heard the explosions above my head. Numerous inverted tornadoes were forming above. I listened to the winds colliding and exploding into vibrant colours as they rammed each other at supersonic speed. A fault formed on the dried ocean basin, expanding rapidly towards the island. A screech and then a roar erupted from the womb of our dying planet. The earth has a womb, like the sky has a roof, and both were in a collision course. The taste from my unfinished plate was still on my lips. I took a final mouthful and walked towards Amala. My feet were light and almost floating above the ground. I came close to her and asked, “Can I have the final moment with you?”
“Yes, Anirban. I was waiting.” I saw her hands tremble as she spoke.
I embraced her tightly and did not let go. Soon, the ground set us free to the swallowing sky. Earth’s gravitational force waved goodbye as we approached one of the tornadoes’ eyes. I could see the atmosphere stripping around us. The wind scraped our skin like numerous sandpapers. She caved her face on my chest, and I closed my eyes.
Our planet will soon be nothing but rubble in the vast cosmos. Removed. Forgotten. But maybe we did something, however insignificant it might be. We crafted stories for us, not for our children.
After inhaling the last air pocket, I whispered in Amala’s ear, “I love you.”
Her hand stopped shaking.
***
Soham Guha's works have been published in Kalpabiswa, Scroll.in, Mohs 5.5: Megastructures (Part of LunarCodex), Mithila Review, Desh, Kishore Bharati, Unish-Kuri, Meteotopia: Futures of Climate (In)justice, Rikka Zine, Ecooceanic: Southern Flows, and The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction Vol II. His Bengali speculative fiction works are featured in Arshimedes and Other Stories (2022, Kalpabiswa Publications). His debut novel, Opragoitihasik: Part I: Ishwarer Bagan, published in 2023 by Kalpabiswa, is the first part of a hard science fiction trilogy. You can find him on X: @penkeepersoham.
