When Mahua wakes up, the first thing she sees is a map. It is a map of her life’s journey, it is her heart’s desire, it is the abstract landscape of the new science, the new knowledge she has helped develop. More mundanely, it is the cracked plaster on the ceiling. In some places, the cracks remind her of the map of Delhi when she was a student there; other places are like the aerial view of the Gangetic delta. Smaller cracks branch off the wider ones, and so on, and so on, and some even connect to other cracks, forming a web as delicate as the veins of a leaf. She can lie in bed for hours, observing the ceiling, reminiscing, making metaphorical leaps, intellectual exercises that only delay the inevitable. But, later today, the journalist will be coming. The thought of him, and the news that he might bring—about Raghu, after all these years! Pain stabs her heart. I must be prepared. The man from Brazil is only bringing her the confirmation that she needs. She doesn’t see journalists anymore—they tend to hail her as the heroine of the Great Turning, the Maha-Parivartan—such nonsense! But this man, he said he had some information about Raghu. She breathes deeply and deliberately until the anxiety dissolves and rises carefully from the bed. She stands on her own two slightly shaky legs, acknowledging their loyalty to her body for over seven decades.
Later, in the kitchen, she makes a cup of tea in the semidarkness. The others will be downstairs soon—she can hear creaks, mumbles, the sleepy, shuffling walk to the bathroom upstairs, the muted sounds of the flush. The domicile houses twenty-three people, so the three bathrooms require a patience for queues and some bladder control. Sipping her tea by the window, she watches the sunrise, accompanied by the dawn chorus of mynahs, doves, jungle babblers, and birds she can’t identify. The light is sufficient now for the shadows to have acquired clarity—the trees in their mist-wrapped greenery, the vegetable gardens between the domiciles lower down the hill. From her vantage point, she is looking southwest toward what was once Mumbai, the greatest of all cities of the Age of Kuber. In the distance, the glass towers rise above the drowned streets, glinting gold where they catch the low light of the sun. She can see dark patches and holes like blind eyes on the sides of the buildings, where storms and human violence have taken out the windows. The sea has reclaimed the city—fish now swim in what was once Charni Road, and crabs and mussels have taken up residence in the National Stock Exchange. The fisherfolk ply their boats and barges in the watery streets, and she thinks she can hear their calls mixed with the cries of seabirds on the wind.
She turns—the child Mina is running down the stairs two steps at a time, her hair a tousled mass. “Did I miss it?”
“No. Come and look!”
They stand at the window together. At the bottom of the hill, shrouded in the semidarkness, is the river, waiting for the sun to edge its way above the hills to the east. There! The light breaks over the rim. The lazy meander of the river through the land is like a word written in fire. The sun is full on it; the new marsh, dark by contrast, edges the brightness like rust on a sword. This is poetry, this moment, the sun’s brushstroke on the water. The suntower on the opposite hill is turning slowly, its petals opening to the light. As they watch, a flock of ducks rise high over the mangroves at the edge of the marsh, wheeling in a sinuous half-arc and settling again among the reeds.
The Mithi River is running full because of the monsoons. Twenty years ago, the edge of the river had been a waste dump, bordered by shoddily built high-rises. The developer mafia had held the reclamation project at bay until the superstorms came, levelling buildings, forcing the river to flow backwards and inundate the city with decades of effluents, sewage, and other refuse. Mahua had joined a citizen’s group engaged in cleaning the city, and she had eventually recruited them to turn the abused lands into a mangrove wetland that would restore the ecology and clean the water. Protect us from storm surges. Natural sewage treatment. Experiment with the new ways of living. She remembers the arguments in the citizen councils, and all that it had taken to win over vested interests. Years and years of work, during which the seas rose, and Mumbai became an archipelago again, and resettlement became a crisis of enormous proportions. All these years later her reward is this daily ritual with the child, watching from the window. Raghu, if only you were here! Each time she sees the ducks flying over the suntower, turning in a wide arc to settle on the marsh in the dawn light, her heart beats a little faster, a drut of joy.
“Has he come yet, the journalist?”
“No, Mina. But he just pinged me. He’ll be two hours late. It’s the water taxis. They’re always slower in the rainy season.”
“But it’s not raining now! Aaji, tell me again about your friend Raghu.”
“Later. Let me give the goats a treat.”
All morning Mahua has been helping the children shell peas. Now she gets up slowly and takes the empty pea pods over to the goat shed. The air is moist with the promise of rain. The house is a dome, a green mound, its roof and walls almost entirely covered with the broad leaves of three different kinds of gourds. The peas grow at the ground level, but the boundary between house and garden is not at all clear. The house is at the top of the hill, and she has a good view of the basti she has helped create, the newest one of hundreds of experimental settlements scattered throughout the country.
Once a basti of this design was just a dream. Look at it now, the persistence of that dream, the dwellings on this hilclass="underline" dome-shaped to reduce the impact of the storms, thick walls of clay, straw, and recycled brick, covered with greenery, the architecture a marriage of the ancient and the new modern. The walkways follow the natural contours of the land. The vegetables cascade off the walls on vines, and down the hill. At the next house, the children are harvesting, monkey-like, on rope ladders, before the monkeys come. The nearest suntower rises like a prayer to the sun on the next rise, its petals open to the light, speaking through electronic messages to the next one, and the next one, distributing power according to algorithms developed by the networks themselves. This basti, like most of its kind, is embedded with sensors that monitor and report a constant stream of data—temperature, humidity, energy use, carbon storage, chemical contaminants, biodiversity. If Mahua wears her Shell, she will have access, visual and auditory, to any and all of the data streams. There had been a time when she was never without a Shell in her ear and a fully sensorized visor. But in the last few years, the visor has been lying in a box, gathering dust, and she’s been leaving the Shell by her bedside. Recently, she has been feeling the effects of aging, and it is a new, strange feeling to acknowledge the body—she, who has led such a rich life of the mind. Her doctors want her to wear medical sensors, but she has refused. There’s something she’s been listening for, she thinks, watching the goats. She’s been waiting for a change.
Mahua’s particular talent always has been the recognition of patterns and relationships. Whenever she has had a shift of perspective or revelation, it has been preceded by a feeling of waiting—as though her unconscious knows well beforehand that something new is coming. But why now, so long after she has stopped doing active work? What has she been waiting for, apart from confirmation of Raghu’s death in the Amazon? When she first moved to the Mumbai shores for good, twenty-seven years ago, she used to watch the western sea for his arrival, in defiance of all reason. Reason had won, eventually.