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 a major project in its tracks that involved replacing forests with photosynthesis-enhancing artificial trees. In Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, transport workers 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 nonstop for days, she had missed the news about the election. 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.”