New horizons, p.45
New Horizons, page 45
‘It’s that fall you had when you were a child,’ Mahua’s grandmother would say, shaking her head. ‘Fell off a tree, hurt her head. Now she can’t remember anything unless she repeats it a hundred times!’
Later, Kalpana had gone to live in her college hostel, thanks to a grant for underprivileged students. Whenever Mahua asked how she was doing, Kalpana would laugh and say all was well. But, after a while, her eyes turned sad, and her ready laugh sounded forced. It was only later that Mahua put two and two together. Kalpana-di’s fellow students – privileged, upper class – were like aliens from another world. Her English was utilitarian, but they were at home in it; their mannerisms and customs were unlike anything she had encountered. There were sexual orgies in the hostel to which she was mockingly invited. She was teased constantly by a group of college boys who called her Essie Esty, and mocked her dark skin and slow mind. She started failing her courses, but she was too ashamed to tell her family, especially now that Mahua was doing so well. In her suicide note, she wrote that three boys – sons of rich businessmen and government officers – offered to help her with the final exams in return for sex. Having been teased for what she herself had come to think of as her ugliness and her heavily accented English, she assumed at first that this was another cruel joke. But the boys were serious, she wrote. They said that nobody would want to marry her, so why not get a little experience?
The next few lines had been crossed out so many times that they were unreadable. ‘I can’t bear it,’ she wrote at the end of the letter. ‘You’ll be better off without me. Forgive me.’
The police investigation came to nothing – the three young men had resources that Mahua’s grandmother did not. For months afterwards, Mahua carried within her a fierce and all-consuming anger. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind: Kalpana-di’s body hanging from the curtain rod in her hostel room. Not knowing what to do with her rage, Mahua turned to her studies with increased vigour, carrying off honours and awards, feeling, after every victory, a vengeful satisfaction. For you, Kalpana-di, she would say to herself.
Mahua formed her first tentative friendships in college, but her friends tended to think of her as an oddball genius. When she described her out-of-body experiments of comradeship with water or birds or ants, they called her brilliant and strange, and changed the subject. At first this upset her – she felt passionately that what she had, this desire and ability to be companionably present with the non-human and the inanimate, was something potentially important, that it could be developed and learned by anyone and improved with practice. But nobody believed her when she tried to explain. It was one of her first life lessons – that most people are content to live within their perceived limitations.
After that, she stopped talking about it. But it got her interested in the development of ways for people to sense the information flows around them – between matter and matter, inanimate and otherwise. Eventually, this led her to the work that would make her famous: the development of embedded intelligence agents in the inanimate world, the creation of the modern, sensate city.
But in her undergraduate years, those were distant visions. She was determined to stay on the path she had chosen for herself: to study engineering, to make a mark in the world, to make her grandmother proud of her. She would go out sometimes with her friends to movies or to parties, but always kept herself aloof from close relationships – until she fell in love with a fellow student called Vikas. They were interested in the same things and had started studying together. He was good-looking and treated her with respect. She had never thought of herself as pretty but in his company, she felt beautiful. One night, while studying late for an exam, they went out for a drink. In the crowded, noisy bar, they touched glasses, grasped hands and kissed.
To her, the kiss was the promise of the companionship she had never had, of both mind and body. The next day she felt alive in an entirely new way, exquisitely aware of her body’s language, the stirrings of desire. So when Vikas asked her to spend the night, she nodded shyly. ‘It’s not like we can be serious or anything,’ he said the next morning as they lay in bed. ‘You know, my family and all. But we can have a little fun, can’t we?’
Her blood ran cold. ‘Never speak to me again,’ she told him as she left.
After that, she became wary of intimate relationships. When she met Raghu at a conference, she was open to the possibility of a friendship, nothing more. Domesticity, in any case, was not for her. Other people had families and children; she had ideas. That was the way it was meant to be.
Raghu had been a student of time. A scion of a well-off family, he had walked away from his old life, divorced himself from his past to study the possibilities of the future. His talents took him to climatology and eventually, to creating virtual reality renditions of possible futures. His simulator mapped out paths to the future based on climate models, and a continually adjustable jiggle matrix allowed for incoming data to change future predictions. One could sit in the simulator dome and have a full-on sensory experience of a chosen future.
His immersion in one possible future for Delhi had nearly killed him. He had violated his own safety protocols and conducted the experiment alone. He had begun by following the brightest thread of probability and falling into that future. The first time they met, he described it to Mahua so vividly, she could see it in her mind’s eye.
He’s lying in the sand, in the relentless heat. The sand half buries his old home in Lajpat Nagar. Everyone who could leave has left on the Great Migration north. His walk through the abandoned city has filled him with horror – he has seen the shattered remains of once-tall buildings, windows of buried houses peering out of sand dunes, an emaciated corpse leaning against the wall, holding a bundle in its arms that could be a child. He was supposed to join the great exodus – why is he here? The heat is terrible: 37˚C but made fatal by the humidity. Above 35˚C, too much humidity makes it impossible for the body to cool by sweating. There is no getting around the laws of thermodynamics. Death is less than five hours away. He lies on his side, weak with exhaustion, and he sees a lizard on the window sill of the house in front of him. How is it something is still alive here? Oh Dilli, that has existed for 5,000 years to end like this!
‘I looked up and saw the flyover, the arches of roadways, against the sky ending in mid-air,’ he told Mahua. ‘Around me were the relics of our era – the Age of Kuber – abandoned cars, toppled statues of prime ministers. Everything was destroyed, everything abandoned. I knew I was going to die there. I kept looking at the lizard. Magnificent creature, it had a crest going down its back. I thought maybe it was a weird, surreal manifestation of the jiggle matrix. But I desperately wanted it to be real – the only other thing in that devastation that was alive.’
‘What happened then?’ Mahua said, her eyes round with wonder. They had been talking for two hours straight in the conference reception room, oblivious to the conversations around them, the clinking of wine glasses and the waiters carrying tiny samosas on trays. For both of them this first meeting felt like coming home.
‘Well, my friend Vincent happened to come to the lab because he had forgotten his notes for a presentation the next day. Saw me twitching in the sim dome. Pulled the plug. I was in hospital for a week.’
‘But why? You weren’t really experiencing a heat stroke.’
‘Ah, but it felt so real that my body sweated out a lot of water. I was cold, I was dehydrated, going into some kind of shock. Learned my lesson. We’ve just integrated the entire system with safety nets so thick not even an ant could fall through them. But it takes too much energy to run. So I’m not sure anyone’s actually going to invest in it.’
‘What’s your motivation for the VR immersion? Why not stick to the usual data visualizations?’
Raghu’s eyes lit up. ‘That’s a much longer conversation. Shall we flee this farce and go find a restaurant? I’m hungry.’ In the restaurant, over biryani and kebabs, he explained. ‘See, the trouble with climate modelling, actually, with any kind of complex systems modelling is that the modeller – that’s me – is always on the outside, looking in. That’s fine if you are trying to figure out future trends for a company or something that’s really outside yourself. But climate is not outside us, we are part of the earth’s system, we influence and are influenced by climate. I think if we only look at data at a remove, we will miss something.’
Looking at his eager, earnest face, his hands gesticulating, Mahua had the realization that here, at last, was somebody she could really talk to.
Raghu was as social and friendly as Mahua was quiet and reserved, and he liked frequent, uncomplicated, honest sex with willing partners without strings on either side. His partners always talked well of him, often with nostalgic smiles. But he never treated Mahua with anything other than a friendly regard. As she got close to him, she assumed that she was outside his range of choices, just as she had been for Vikas. Once, they stayed up all night on the steps of the university library, sharing their life histories, and she told him about Vikas. ‘I know now that I don’t want to marry,’ she said. ‘My work is my life. But it was the way he assumed that I was not – I could not – be a serious contender for a relationship. Ever since, if somebody gets too close to me, I want to tear his throat out.’
Raghu didn’t laugh. ‘You’ve been hurt,’ he said gently. ‘Give it time. Not everyone is like Vikas.’
Later, she realized that he was attracted to her, but knowing her history, he did not want to push her in any way. He was waiting for her to make the first move. When she first went to him, filled with a great deal of trepidation and terror, it was not easy. For her, it would never come easy to surrender her last refuge, her body, to another person. Raghu’s gentleness, the way he looked at her as an equal, a fellow human being with desires and vulnerabilities, slowly took the edge off her rage and confusion, but it didn’t feel right. It was always too much of an effort for her to be comfortable with the body’s desires. It was easier, in those days, to swear off such intimate relationships. So, they parted as lovers, but their friendship deepened.
Raghu would delight her grandmother by coming home and cooking for them. He learned songs from the old lady in her native tongue, and they would laugh and sing in the kitchen. Mahua’s grandmother had been a traditional healer in her village, and he would bring illustrated botanical tomes to her and ask her about this plant or that one. He would break dates with lovers to be with them. Not since Kalpana di had lived with them had the household felt so joyful.
Raghu’s restless mind stimulated Mahua’s own. He brought her whatever excited him at the moment – research papers, science fiction novels and tomes on radical urban design. Modern industrial civilization had been battling nature for nearly three centuries now, he said, and look at the result – the unravelling of the very systems that provided us with oxygen, fresh air, water, and a liveable temperature range. How could you call such a system a success? The hubris of the Age of Kuber, as he termed the madness of the mid-twenty-first century, lay in the assumption of humans being outside of nature. ‘Yet we breathe, sweat, shit, fuck. What a delusion! Mainstream economics – the greatest of scams!’ And he would raise a glass of beer, or a cup of tea, in mock salutation.
Outside the citadels of power, uprisings and disturbances were sweeping the countryside. In Bihar and Jharkhand, a network of Santhali women’s cooperatives had stopped in its tracks a major project that involved replacing forests with photosynthesis-enhancing artificial trees. In Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, transport workers had declared the largest strike in history when the first robot train made its inaugural run. In Karnataka, fields of experimental crops managed by Ultracorp were set on fire by thousands of farmers.
By this time Mahua thought of herself as a progressive urbanite, a scientist and technologist entirely at home in Delhi. She had garnered some respect for her ideas. Her straight, swift-paced, challenging walk, which she had developed as a defence against the classmates who had teased her in school, could part crowds and silence lecture halls as she strode in. When Raghu talked about the increasing importance of traditional ecological knowledge, she agreed, read the papers on the subject, but felt unable to own her origins. Her grandmother had never forced her to do so, and nor had Mahua ever taken advantage of the reservation system. Even being a woman had become parenthetical to her existence. She was an engineer, full stop.
‘For heaven’s sake, woman, you’re human!’
‘Shut up, Raghu, please! Can we go back to looking at the energy distribution simulations –’
Mahua was obsessed with the problem of scale. To move civilization away from self-destruction required massive changes – one small, experimental zero-carbon basti was not going to make one whit of difference in a world facing biosphere failure on a global scale. At the same time, extreme weather was driving local conflicts – mass migrations were already beginning from areas that were now uninhabitable due to extreme temperature and rising sea levels.
One evening, Mahua and Raghu met at their usual café, at the corner of Aurobindo Marg and Ring Road. Mahua had an idea that she wanted to share – working non-stop for days, she had missed the news about the elections. She and Raghu had not met for some weeks – sometimes, he would disappear into the heart of the city, not replying to texts or calls. His friends had become used to this. But today, he was here, full of news about the election results. She didn’t want to hear about corporation battles. The glass window of the café looked out on Ring Road; there was the muted roar of traffic, the neon trails of cars and other vehicles flashing by. Skyscrapers glittered with lit windows and advertisements, and Ultracorp’s lightning bolt icon flashed from a hundred walls and signboards with headache-inducing persistence. On the footpath outside the café, a throng of haggard people returning from work walked stoop-shouldered in the unrelenting evening heat. A group of day labourers, their headcloths stained with sweat, looked enviously into the unreachable cool comfort of the air-conditioned café as they passed.
A long, low sound like a foghorn announced the victory parade, and everyone in the café stopped talking to look. On the main road appeared a flotilla of long, sleek buses, moving slowly. From the video screens along the sides of the vehicles, the prime minister smiled at the public with folded hands. Atop each bus was the ubiquitous global symbol of Gaiacorp, the planet rendered in blue and green, with the word Gaia branded in white, glowing letters across it. Gaiacorp had just won the bidding war to run the Indian government – they already ran the New States of America and the Arctic Union. They had roundly defeated the incumbents, Ultracorp, in this election. Victory music blared from the buses as they went past, making the café’s glass wall shake. A cartoon of the Gaia icon trouncing a lightning bolt – the symbol of Ultracorp – flashed on the sides of buildings as the triumphant procession went past. All at once, the Ultracorp icons that had decorated the walls of skyscrapers and apartment complexes went dark, and in their place glowed hundreds of little earths. Gaia wins, India wins! Bringing you prosperity and comfort beyond your wildest dreams. Enormous waves of blue light swept the canyons between the roadways. Blue was the official colour of Gaiacorp.
It was a spectacle of such magnitude and power that Raghu and Mahua couldn’t speak for a few minutes. They sat sipping their drinks, staring into the night, while the café buzzed with excited conversations.
‘Who are we?’ Raghu said after a while, in a depressed monotone. ‘We are nothing. Nothing at all in front of these bastards.’
It occurred to Mahua that the problem of isolated resistance to their political overlords was maybe, and maybe not, connected with her idea about cities and scale.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You know that disused road near the hostel? There’s a large tree growing there – I think it’s diseased or something because it keeps dropping leaves, small leaves. Yesterday, the wind was blowing, and I noticed how some of the leaves were caught in little cracks in the road. I went to take a look. The leaves must have been there for a while, because bits of soil had collected in them, and little weeds had come up. The road was filled with these little tufts of leaves with soil and weeds growing out of them like a bunch of islands in a sea.’
‘And your point is?’
‘Well, there were places along the side of the road that had already become overrun with weeds by the same process. And some of the islands were connected to other islands through cracks. So it occurred to me – well, the road is so much stronger than a leaf. But when a leaf settles in a crack, it starts a process. Soil accumulates, plants start to grow, and you know what plant roots can do.’
‘Split rock,’ Raghu said slowly. ‘Split the road.’
‘Yes. Eventually, if there’s no interference, the road will be completely broken up and overwhelmed by vegetation. It’s like how biofilms develop or crystals.’
‘So small things –’
‘If they are the right small things, but also if they have the right kind of connectivity –’
‘– can topple a monster!’ Raghu raised his glass into the air and finished his drink in a gulp. ‘But we already know this – just look at history, look at how the mega-corporations insinuated themselves into national governments in the first place – the biggest global coup d’etat in human history, all through the application of network theory and hired muscle –’
‘But what I’m saying is more than that! I think, maybe, that the city isn’t the right idea for what we’re trying to do. You know? All your pestering me about re-thinking the city? So I did. Why would we want to live in the city as it is now – when people don’t have time for anything but work? There’s constant stress, people don’t know each other, don’t care either, where democracy is a sham? What kind of way is that to live? A megapolis is beyond the scale of human social adaptation. So, instead, we could have smaller bastis like Ashapur, maybe a thousand of them in a cluster, but connected through the Sensornet as well as a physical network of roads and green corridors –’
