The ratnapark gondola station

There was something wrong with the air. It smelled sweet, metallic, like burned steel. He took in a big whiff of air. Something was up, he couldn't tell what it was. Outside, the gondolas started screeching into the station. He could see the shadows cast by the passengers illuminated by sparks on the wire, on the wall across. The government had budgeted for fixing the sparks several years ago, but someone had discovered the sparks didn't actually cause any fundamental faults in the system. The budget was lost in the bureaucracy and the repairs ended up never happening.

Below the station on the busy street, vegetable vendors had set up shop for the evening. The station provided good shelter from rains, and the location was good for foot traffic. The metropolitan police had tried evicting them several times in the past, but somehow they would always pop back up a couple of days later. There was an implicit understanding that they wouldn't cause too many disruptions and assist the police with their investigations whenever they could, and in return the mayor's office would turn a blind eye to their encroachment of public space. It was also rumored that each stall was paying a certain amount of weekly bribe to the local don in return for protection from the city authorities, but it was all mostly hearsay. The other rumor about the vegetable stalls was of course true, and the papers had published several exposes -- to no one's surprise or concern. They did in fact all host several audio recording devices, connected to state-of-the-art computers and algorithms that could isolate a single human voice over a distance of a hundred and fifty feet, among dozens of other voices and loud background sounds, and they were in fact paid a not unreasonable amount for doing so. This was all an open secret --  if those devices had ever caught anything important or of interest, it could only have been because someone was being rather naive, or stupid.

The sky-blue paint on the station tower was starting to peel off. The vodka brand that had splashed its color all over had recently gone out of business after its distillation process had been discovered to be faulty, and blinded half a dozen villagers out in the west. The city's several negotiations with several brands to sponsor the station had failed, no one wanted to be associated with vodka chowk and the associated disaster at the time.

A light breeze brought in the bitter rotting smell of the sewers. The streets had flooded with sewage forever, but the cave-ins were quite recent. Parts of the city where the streets had caved-in had seen their sewage flow out in the open even when it wasn't raining. NewspJeapers had been publishing articles proposing building a new layer of infrastructure over existing ones -- bridges and houses over existing city streets so that limited city real-estate could be expanded, and there would be a relief from the stench of the sinking city. You cannot live in a bridge city, he had said in an interview to a local FM channel, when your city is sinking down and drowning. His opinion was in the minority at this point. The Chinese had funded three high-level feasibility studies that had given the green signals -- three of their biggest construction companies had already put in full-front-page ads in the papers proposing to turn the existing streets into 'subway' and create a city that 'rises like a phoenix'.  A phoenix rises up from its ashes, he had thought, not from its shitbucket.
 
He checked the time. Ten to eight. He would wait for another ten minutes and head home. She wasn't picking up his calls. A different day perhaps, or maybe she changed her mind. No matter, it's fine, he thought to himself. She was a very passionate person, and she wanted everything to be done in her exact way. Any deviation caused her great suffering. She wouldn't be this late unless something had happened. Oh well.