New horizons, p.11
New Horizons, page 11
I said, laughing: ‘Brother! You have done wonders in all spheres. Made all problems solvable and the impossible possible. Perhaps you know no such thing as impossibility. These very same cows caused Hindus and Muslims of the twentieth century and before that to thirst for each other’s blood.’
Haque: ‘They were our ancestors. It is not proper to speak ill of them now. That said, it was pure ignorance. Both failed to consider their long-term good. Gold was being plundered, and they were stick-fighting over coals. Truly, to this day we can’t help laughing when we read about those times.’ (p. 78)
6. Shiksha-paddati: Tarun Kaksha (The Educational System: Classes for Youth)
Here the student studies only according to his/her aptitude and inclination and those fields he/she has already shown a preference for… Nalanda University has 15 different schools known for the study of linguistics and archaeology, astronomy, philosophy, literature, music, fine arts, civil engineering, medicine, botany, biology, agriculture, mechanics and education. The professors are well-versed in their disciplines. The department of linguistics and archaeology introduces the students to original sources in history and equips them with the tools for gathering these. After all, this is not the twentieth century, but the twenty-second. Many archaeological finds buried under earth, sand, and sea have shed light on the beliefs, lifestyles and history of several lost peoples… The nation has left no stone unturned in collecting and preserving these materials. (p. 107)
…
The old stupas and buildings of Nalanda have been fully preserved. The Buddha statue famed among villagers in the twentieth century as ‘Bhairav-ji’ now has a fine canopy over it. This large, beautiful, serene statue appears even more enchanting now. The large stupa next to it looks as good as new. (p. 110)
7. Shasan Pranali (System of Governance)
…
Now man is equal to man, and women and men are equal… The earth has no landlords, no merchants and moneylenders, no kings, no subjects, no rich, no poor, no high, no low. All the inhabitants of the world are one family. The earth’s mobile and immobile property belongs to that family…rarely does a village produce everything it needs without the help of the other… Humanity is abundantly supplied with material goods due to this; so much time would be wasted otherwise. When was it possible to do what humans do today: to enjoy 20 hours of leisure with only four hours of labour?
SHIT FLOWER
ANIL MENON
In its underground cavern, cathedral-like with its glittering spears of light and rust-stained barrel vaults, Goose continued to do what it had done for over five decades: route sludge water in the temple city of Mumbai. It was 3.04 a.m. IST, 2089 CE.
Goose cared little about light, vaults or cathedrals. But sludge was a different matter. Twenty million people, and at least as many non-people, can and will produce an ocean’s worth of biosolids on a daily basis. Goose and its many software incarnations across the sewer system raised and lowered gates, adjusted valves, tweaked pressure here, tweaked volume there, and did everything they could do to encourage the temple city’s illusion that it had no anus.
3.05 a.m. There was someone at the door.
‘Knock, knock.’
‘Who’s there?’ inquired Goose (so to speak).
‘I am.’
‘I am who?’
‘492b616d2b612b6c696172…’
Goose ‘got’ the knock-knock joke. This was a pity. The virus’s punch line, a very funny Gödel number, rewrote aspects of the sewer gate controller’s sense of self, its synthetic consciousness, as it were. Goose had been breached. Ditto for other controllers across the system.
The situation was quite ironic. In 2030 ce, Simon Jósda, a computational immunologist, had proved that any sufficiently secure system necessarily had to have a sense of ‘humour’. Secure systems had to know what to take seriously; they had to be able to ‘get’ jokes, recognize the ‘funny’ in funny business.
Of course, the formal version of Jósda’s paper had been properly humourless. However, he had compared structured communication protocols to the ‘Jo/-Ha/-Kyu’ rules for correct gesturing in Noh drama, ergo, ‘jokes’. Goose spent three seconds out of every minute telling itself jokes.
This time, however, the joke was on Goose. As the ‘laugh’ spread through the system, the Geese lost control of the city’s bowels. Goose was able to put out a distress cry just as the biosolids hit the vent fans at the approximate rate of a hundred thousand gallons per minute.
2089 CE and progress notwithstanding, shit was still something of a real nuisance.
He had always loved working in the quiet of the morning. But his wife had been a noisy, bossy woman, and since she had got up around 7 a.m. in his house, Simon Jósda had developed the habit of waking around 3 a.m.
So, by 3.15 a.m. IST, he was wide awake in his very quiet apartment in Worli, in west Mumbai. His body woke him up to reach for his long-dead wife, Radha, just as it had awoken him each day in the 30 years they had been together. As with all tigresses, she had been best approached half-asleep, from the rear.
He half sat up in bed, groped for the bedside lamp.
‘Many happy returns of the day, Doctor Simon Jósda,’ said the House.
‘For Pete’s sake, it’s the third bloody time. Shut the fuck up.’
The House didn’t mind. If it had minded, it would have said something like, ‘Listen, asshole, if you had a Sensorium, I would know for sure whether you were awake or not. I wouldn’t have to base my guesses on your bodily noises, of which you have a bewildering number, and gestures, which your miserable Anglo-American body hoards. But you don’t have a Sensorium, so I tend to get fooled. Half the time I’m not even sure if you are dead or alive. So give me a break. Now, many happy returns of the day, Doctor Simon Jósda.’
Today, Simon was 90 years old. He continued to lie in bed, flexing his wrists in anticipation of the forthcoming physical effort. Ninety may be the new 70 but it was still fucking 90. He sat up with a surge of will, waited for the slight dizziness to subside, swivelled his feet on to the floor, slipped on the WalkSafe belt, lifted himself off the bed, and walked barefoot to the bathroom. He liked the morning coolness of the marble; it reminded him of the winters in Edmonton, the pitter-patter of childhood’s bare feet on the cold hardwood floors.
After his ablutions, he worked on the mathematics of biased random walks on groups for about two hours, deriving the consequences of an earlier intuition, until he realized that he had been wrong all along. He was too experienced to be upset, but it made him restless. It was time for his walk anyway.
He pulled on a fresh white kurta–pyjama, gasping with pain as his right shoulder acted up, ran a comb several times through the white mane Radha had been so proud of, chose a walking stick, looked around his silent 2-BHK apartment with its L-shaped living room, and announced quite unnecessarily: ‘I’m leaving for my walk.’
‘Have a nice walk, Doctor Simon Jósda,’ said the House, going along with the pretence that it wouldn’t know what Simon was up to once he left the house.
5.25 a.m. IST. He stepped out, good-morning-ed Mrs Dixit, who looked up from the rangoli she was drawing on her threshold and smiled. Outside, it was still dark and other than the glowering inspection of street dogs, there were few signs of life on the road. He knew that would soon change. Life in the city was centred around the temples. He breathed in the air, pleased as always at its purity. In the distance, he could hear loudspeakers blasting the opening stanza of M.S. Subbulakshmi’s Suprabhatam, cajoling the sleepy god Sri Balaji to awaken.
Sensoriums had made loudspeakers utterly obsolete, yet it probably hadn’t occurred to anyone that they could now ease up on the noise pollution. It pleased him, this stubborn resistance to rationality.
He walked eastwards, briskly stepping over construction debris and ignoring the catcalls from the hijras resting under the flyovers. They were harmless in the morning, too strung out to move, too good-humoured from last night’s games. Fifteen minutes later, just past Tulsi Vihar, he crossed the Jain temple, an inspired copy, or an incarnation as the faithful liked to call it, of the Kolanupaka Temple in Andhra Pradesh. He wove his way through the Jains dressed in white. The way the men wore their dhotis had once reminded him of Roman senators in togas, but these days, it was the other way around.
Ten minutes later, he turned left and began to pass shops selling coconuts, garlands of jasmine, panchamirtam and camphor pellets; the air roiled with the smell of a dozen different kinds of flowers and incense. The massive stone edifice that was the Subramanya Temple was just ahead. Its ornate tower, an efflorescence in stone of gods, colours and strange beasts, was an exact copy of the Tiruchendur Subramanya Temple in Tamil Nadu. As he passed, he checked his watch: 6.05 a.m. In five minutes, it would be time for the first ritual washing of the god with milk. The devotees would fuse their Sensoriums at the precise moment the doors to the inner sanctum opened, and the apparent result was a simulacrum of the samadhi that was so central to Hindu philosophy. Radha claimed it wasn’t a simulacrum but the real thing – Patanjali’s savikalpa to be precise – and that if he got a Sensorium like most open-minded people, he wouldn’t have to sample life in pathetic, un-spiced nibbles.
Temple flowers everywhere. Radha had taught him their Tamil names. The white jasmine flowers came as a pair of sisters: malli and mullai. There was the orange kanakambharam; the blue neelambaram; the fragrant brown makazhambpu; the red chambarthi; the sandalwood-coloured samandhipu; the two kinds of yellow: thazambu and chevanthi, with and without fragrance respectively. Her favourite was the tamarapu, the lotus flower, which was all these colours and more.
‘Should be called shit flower,’ he’d joked. The lotus grew very well in muddy water, ‘pu’ in Tamil meant flower, ‘poo’ in English meant – ‘C’mon Rads, don’t get mad, it’s an excellent cross-cultural pun. It’s a little funny, you have to admit.’
‘Also a little aggressive. How did a lotus become a shit flower? Because you’re afraid. You hear these Tamil names, and they distance you from me. You don’t like that feeling so you lash out. Simon, have more faith in us.’
Faith was around him, everywhere. The men wore flowers tucked behind their ears, the women had flowers plaited into their coiled strands, the children wore garlands. The Tamils were crazy about flowers. Their women made love wearing flowers. Their men had gone to war wearing flowers. The Sangam poets had coded their songs of love and war with flowers. Radha had been crazy about flowers.
He could hear the muezzin’s call to the faithful from the Worli Masjid three blocks down, just behind the banyan tree where Gopika-ji the cow had given birth to twins on that horrendous monsoon day, the notable event now marked by a small shrine tucked into one of the banyan’s crevices –
What, still not clear? Arre yaar, it’s right across from the Shirdi Sai Baba Temple where Bharati, Kishanlal’s blind wife, took refuge from the mob boss Robert, and had her sight miraculously restored when she heard Akbar, her long-lost son who was raised by a Muslim, sing a song in praise of Shirdi Wale Sai Baba. No, no, no, that’s a scene from the movie Amar, Akbar, Anthony. Look, friend, ask any rickshawalla, they’ll take you, that is simplest, yes.
Past the Shirdi Sai Baba Temple, he began to get tired. He turned left, past the Armenian Church. It was now defunct and home to squatters, but there was talk of an Armenian group from Kolkata coming to fix it up. That would be great. Mumbai worked because its temples, churches, masjids and synagogues worked. The religious institutions organized the neighbourhood, maintained communal harmony, kept crime in check, cleaned the streets, took care of the indigent, ran the hospitals, and ensured that absolute, true and mathematical spacetime had a human heart.
The Worli Seaface was the last leg of his walk. It was also the best part – cool, windy, disinterested. The vast Arabian sea to his right and the sprawling bulging mass of the city to his left always made him feel as if he had rolled up Mumbai in a blanket and was carrying it on his back. He stood for a moment, hands on his hips, catching his breath, gazing at the infinite expanse. Not really infinite, though. Radha’s Antariksh had been just as illusory.
Radha: as fierce, blood-rich and racist as Genghis Khan.
Too late. He heard her lose it in his head. ‘Genghis Khan? Oh yes, the one brown badass that all whiteys know. Why not the Rani of Jhansi? Or Vispala? That bitch was so badass that after losing a leg in battle, she returned to the fight with an iron stump. Three thousand years ago, Jósda. We were making women like that three thousand fucking years ago. Genghis Khan, my ass.’
Calm down, girl. Jeez. He had come to believe her hair-trigger temper was just pent-up sexual aggression, but hadn’t bothered – dared – raise the issue. Why cure a good thing with psychoanalytical insights? He was a lucky, lucky man.
He had known he was a lucky man when he first set eyes on her. To know what one wants, even if it is unachievable, is to be privileged. He had wanted her. He remembered the exact date: 12 March 2034. He had been made a foreign Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Sciences. She had been accompanying a skinny clever-looking Indian dude. They didn’t seem like brother and sister.
I can do clever, he’d thought.
But her flashing eyes and dusky voluptuousness had unnerved him. She could have been a danseuse in Indra’s court, an adornment on some ancient temple pillar. In the end, she had come over.
‘Stop staring at me,’ Radha said. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘You! You are the matter with me.’ He didn’t care if he sounded desperate.
‘Well, deal with it. Find something else to colonize and plunder. I don’t date white boys.’
‘Then we have something in common! I don’t date them either. I’m Simon Jósda.’ He began to hope. She still dated – awesome! ‘Do I at least have a chance?’
‘Pathetic!’ She studied him with those large kohl-lined eyes. ‘You’re the mathematician dude, aren’t you? The brainy bwana who’s come to tell us what we already know. I hope you got your group photo with the little brown kids. What’s next on the poverty cruise? Haiti? Sierra Leone? Well, you got your useless fellowship. Go back, Simon.’
‘So, what do you do? Besides loathing white people?’
‘I run marketing for the Indian branch of Antariksh BioTech.’ She pointed to the skinny clever-looking dude. ‘Pradeep’s the chief scientist. He’s based in the US of A.’
The way she said it, he wasn’t sure if she disliked Americans in general or Pradeep in particular. Didn’t matter either way. He was Canadian. Everybody loved Canadians.
‘What does Anta –’ He stumbled over the complicated word.
‘Antariksh. Anta-rik-sh. It means infinity.’
‘Sounds like ant rickshaw,’ he joked. Then realizing (a) she had no sense of humour and (b) he was squandering precious seconds, he added hastily: ‘What do you make?’
‘Time!’ she’d said dramatically. Then she caught fire, eyes flashing, hands gesturing in the way he had begun to recognize as south Indian, her sensuous face alit with passion.
She had good reason. Pradeep’s citation at the awards ceremony had given no indication of the import of his work. Antariksh Inc. had found a way, it seemed, to make mitochondria more efficient by damaging their central mechanism. Mitochondria produced the energy a cell needed using the ETC, or electron transport chain. But it had been known since the early 2010s that roundworm mutants with disruptions in their mitochondrial ETC tended to live much longer. These mutants worked with an alternate energy production pathway, one that didn’t need much oxygen and didn’t produce certain sugar by-products as waste. The result was a supercharged mitochondrion. Antariksh Inc. had found a way to extend the results to human mitochondria. They’d been able to reverse ageing, boost energy, and convert Radha into an evangelist.
‘Wow, sounds fascinating.’ How could he tell her the whole thing sounded like snake oil? ‘So, you want to live forever?’
‘Hello? I’m a Hindu! We invented reincarnation, remember? Of course, I want to live forever.’
‘Well, it’s not just about being a Hindu, is it?’
What are you doing, Brain? he asked. Brain, what the fuck are you doing? Stop immediately. But his brain couldn’t stop. Relax, Simon. I’m getting to know her, Simon. We’re having an intellectual discussion, Simon.
‘Then what’s it about?’ asked Radha.
‘I mean, do we really want gazillions of immortals running around? Look at this place, it’s coming apart at the seams.’
‘Oh, is it? So how come we’ve been around for ever? Accha, never mind. What’s the right population size? One million people? Fifty? There are 500 million Americans, so I’m sure that’s okay. How many Hindus are okay?’
‘Look, it’s not this group or that group. I don’t have an exact number, but surely there is a number beyond which we’ve got to start cutting back.’
‘Typical!’ she shouted. ‘That’s all life is to you people, isn’t it? Something to be counted, measured and weighed. Well, it isn’t. All life is sacred.’
‘Yes, it is!’ he said, pathetically glad to be able to agree with something.
She smiled, accepted his apologetic namaste.
‘That’s all right, Jósda. It’s your upbringing, I suppose. You’re taught to objectify the world. It’s bloody contagious too. I had a great-uncle who went to the States to become an economist. He went a chikoo and turned into a total coconut. Pathetic!’
‘No, it isn’t.’ He’d had it with her racist bullshit. ‘Your uncle chose to be someone else, that’s all. We get to pick who we are now. That’s what modernity means. All things change, but living things can choose to change. Yes, I know this’ll be a shocker for you, but white people can change too. Deal with it. I thought I was a physicist, then a mathematician, then a computational immunologist, and here I am, an expert on shit.’ Oh good, that got another smile from her. So it wasn’t over. ‘These days I’m okay with not knowing who I am. Seriously, identity is such –’
