Nila Suresh | Capitol | Done

n i l a

To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven

The camera finds her in a purple silk robe at the edge of a short concrete balcony overlooking the capitol. A second angle pans to the lights and blurs together until focus finds Nila’s face. Her hair catches in the wind and she smiles.

[The voiceover comes in as the episode starts]

Have you ever felt nostalgia for place you’ve never known?

She lifts a tumbler glass of brandy to her lips. Her fingers curl around the bottom of the glass as the ice clinks at the edge.

What are our lives, so far removed from what’s come before us?

Sitting in skyscrapers that scream up toward the sky, concrete and punishing, false artifices constructed from raw power and a lack of imagination. People talk about the innovation of the capitol, of great works of art and science, but all I’ve ever seen is a yearning for past that’s long but faded from our minds.

Perhaps it was the many years under the same man’s hand that choked away what had remained from the dark days. Those of us still old enough to remember have a hand on that faded generation, one that could still whisper truth from a memory that moved them. Their hands still reaching for what might’ve made a person understand who, not what they could become.

Which isn’t to say that the burning neon lights outside of Saturn City won’t draw you in and lull you into a stupor. Or that the taste of a fresh swordfish cut into the size of a golf ball and surrounded in reduction foam can’t leave you speechless. But between the causeways and street lamps dotting these passageways of gold, I’ve yet to find a space that won’t dissipate like the clouds after a heavy rainstorm. You remember the petrichor, but only that – the fleeting moment of pleasure that can’t be held in your hands – before all of it disappears, lost to the rabble of sound.

She closers her eyes as the voiceover carries on. The melancholy holds long enough to fade out with the lights behind her.

Still, this nostalgia burns within me like a fever. Aching through my limbs and right through my heart. Caught in my throat but never let speak. It is the sunset of orange and red, bleeding to indigo before the night sets in. A disappearing that always returns. A hope in the unseen. Ours are lives to find this nostalgia come real – as capitolites born to all we’ve ever wanted. And yet lacking everything we could want.

The lights change and a long zoom refocuses on a small boat forging its way through the open ocean. Across the horizon is at first the site of a gray rock soon to be scattered with trees and aging buildings. Shots of boats exiting the harbor and the sound of a running motor cuts through.

The small island off district four was once home to a little less than a thousand before the dark days. They are, as I’m told by the tugboat captain leading me, as friendly as they are intelligible. Fourwegian is the nickname for the dialect of The Rock, a hardened island on the ocean that’s spent decades protecting their home from outsiders. They still send their sons and daughters to the reaping, but the difficulty of boats to dock along the rocky shores and lack of any useful resources provided enough reason for the capitol to leave them enough alone.

And, as some of them will tell it, the capitol was afraid of having to come in to kill every last one of them for their obstinance. Ask an islander and they’ll say they’re willing to die for their home, to protect the rocks and the shoals just as soon as any person threatened it.

She stands across the pier, dressed now in rubber boots and overalls, as much a fisherman as the men walking the dock are capitolites. That is to say she’s all the look of what she should be with none of the swagger. They don’t see her, her existence so much as a sea gull that may have wondered in their paths. She does not cower or recline as they move around her. Only watches, observes, all smiles at the sight of a place she’s never been.

At first glance, the marina docking the rusting ships and aged vessels screams a generation holding onto the past. Any profit has been reinvested across the island. Insulation for houses, food for the families that live here, and medicine and treatment for the sick and infirm.

It takes a few days before anyone is willing to talk to me. Who is this woman from the capitol with her dark hair and cosplaying a fishman as though she could ever hope to learn any of their secrets. But I’ve spent enough of my life being an outsider to know that it’s not about pushing my way through them – it’s taking the moment to breathe in the salty air, to wish them welcome, and to listen.

Exterior shots of closed doors and curious glances from locals. There is not a soul among them that have the same shade – all of them pail and fair skinned, despite their hours at sea and at the beach – she finds no home here. But she has never found a home anywhere. Her mother would have much said the same, that she would never find a home. Her curiosity was too bold for a woman of the capitol, one that strove to know the truth but not destroy it. Her smile is grace, her eyes courage. They find another stone pathway and she walks, forward.

It’s at one of the dive bars that keeps the population pissed and pleased that offered my opening. I took the opportunity to spend a few afternoons drinking with those that had returned from their journeys out to the deep ocean. I took in the wrinkles on their face and the sorrow in their voices as they spoke of each catch breathlessly. That life was better worth living when I could hold it in my own two hands.

Of course, buying a round or four of drinks has a way of greasing their wheels, too.

She laughs along with the men and pulls back another long drink of ale. They’re red faced and she has taken up space, been born into existence beside them. She cannot remind the last time that she felt the same among the capitol. Not at the university where she teaches. Perhaps six summers ago, the last time she and her mother made sambar together.

You’ll never have better fish and chips – it’s just not possible. The barrel-chested brutes will fight anyone who says otherwise, and from their retelling, it’s the geese fat they use to cook it in. Killing the fuckers that manage to come on the island, a nuisance to them but a delicious way of frying, they can keep killing as many of them as they please.

Most families will tell you life hasn’t much changed here in a hundred years, aside from a few casual upgrades in their houses. Electricity caught on a few decades ago. Indoor plumbing a few before that. Closer to the docks, their houses line square grid streets, with carefully cut geometric shapes and vinyl paneled siding.

She walks in quick steps, ever joyous, forward, humming with energy. Her luck has been no luck at all but perseverance against what others said could not be done. And when they had told her no, she had simply done what she pleased anyway. Because as she learned as a child, her satisfaction was never in the hands of anyone but she.

A few miles inland we meet the rocky crags along the hillside and formations that remind me of the surface of the moon. Homes here look like they’re being swallowed by the earth: roofs growing stalks of grass and moss trails down the cracked stone sides.

Much of what they eat has been left to rot and ferment. Another tribute to the rock. Nothing is ever gone so much as it’s become something else. I eat smoked wolffish and rosemary boiled potatoes. It’s an ugly looking thing on the plate but tastes as storied as the hands that prepare them.

She lets the surf come toward her and break in front of her feet. She watches the sunset and crosses her arms across her chest.

A few months from now, there’ll be a ceremony for their sixteen-year-olds. Along this black sand beach they’ll stand shoulder to shoulder, and those that want to stay on the island past their eighteenth birthday will have to walk out into the water and drown. It’s a tradition that has to be frowned upon by the capitol – ancient rites granted by some long forgotten religion – but no one’s bothered to tell them otherwise. And even all the years that a child has died, it’s never been stopped.

And here we were thinking we’d had the monopoly on forcing our children to death.

My last night on the Rock I spend at a bonfire on the beach drinking screech and listening to stories of sailors that’ve passed through the Rock. Generations stretching back beyond the dark days, to when the world had been young. There’s a similar through line, that no matter the change beyond the isle they remained true to the sea. Families lived and died on the rock. But life went on as it always had.

The more things change, the more they stay the same? No.

The fire fades to embers and tomorrow I’ll be back in those skyscrapers. How much longer can they stay in the same place, shrinking, but struggling forward in time?

She gives one last look at the horizon over her shoulder before walking off through the sand. The camera pans away and the background blurs.

[Credits]