The police investigation came to nothing—the three young men had resources that Mahua’s grandmother didn’t have. For months afterward, Mahua carried within her a fierce and all-consuming anger. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind of 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 and 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 determined to stay on the path she had chosen for herself: to study engineering, to make a mark on 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 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 windowsill of the house in front of him. How is it something is still alive here ? Oh Dilli, that has existed for five thousand years to end like this!
“I looked up and saw the flyover, the arches of roadways, against the sky,” he told Mahua. “Ending in midair. 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 wineglasses 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 heatstroke.”
“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. Learnt 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 kababs, 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 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.”