Zenrainman’s house is like a tree.
Grown out of the earth of its own basement on the edge of Bangalore, pressed into bricks.
Nurtured entirely by water and light from its own roof.
It breeds, symbiotically, large primates to maintain it.
Treating their sewage.
To water a rooftop rice paddy ready to grow enough to feed them.
The spaces are full of art and light.
Architecture students come and go, borrowing books.
They’re a means of reproduction, working nearby to design hundreds of similar houses.
The press call to ask a question on water. Bangalore is short of it, a chance at last for change. Sustainable water use.
An itinerant British computer programmer appears for dinner.
They talk about technology and politics, about when opening data harms the common man, about dark mountains, about stamps, about China, about villages which aren’t on Google maps, about wasted tomato harvests, about building a helpful information society.
All find Zenrainman in his chair.
The house/tree attracting the world to one room like flowers to bees.
Just as our cells and our bacteria are equal in number… Is the organism the house or the rice or the human?
I imagine a million years passing, the methods maturing, the earth scattered with these strange complex constructs.
An alien passes. What are these novel trees?
A lovely read.
Zenrainman’s house sounds like a calm oasis on the edge of Bangalore.