“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 megacorporations insinuated themselves into national governments in the first place—the biggest global coup d’état 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 rethinking 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, and don’t care either, where democracy is a sham? What kind of way to live is that? 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—”
“Wait. Let’s explore your metaphor a bit more, Mahu—the leaves at the sides of the road—positive social change always comes from the margins, but islets of resistance in the mainstream are also important—”
“Can we think about future cities instead of politics just for a minute?”
“Everything is political, Mahu, you know that!”
It was not clear to them at the moment in the café how this vision would grow and change with time and experience, but that was when it first took root in their minds. Networked bastis, connected by green corridors, each settlement embedded with sensors, farm towers replacing conventional agriculture. Such settlements would spring up in different parts of the country and the world. Former agricultural lands would return to the wilderness, or to subsistence farming, repairing the damage done to the biosphere’s life-maintaining systems.
“What I want to know,” Mahua said, returning to the present, “is whether an eco-basti like I’m planning, Ashapur, can produce its own microclimate. And how many such microclimates, if networked right, can shift the climate on a larger scale? Like my leaves taking over a road? Or a bacterial biofilm forming?”
But when Ashapur had finally started becoming reality, when its buildings and green areas started producing data, Raghu left. He had helped Mahua design and embed sensors in the walls and windows, trees and byways. He had worked on the teams for the suntowers, the most efficient solar energy system ever built. One could walk the basti with a Shell unit and a data visor, and information from a thousand sensors would flow into their receivers. They could read energy use, temperature, humidity, carbon flows, the lot. But something had been bothering Raghu. He got moody and sullen, and Mahua realized she had to let him follow his demons. He would come back when he was ready.
Then, when Ashapur was about halfway done, she got a chance to spend six months in Mumbai on a city-sensorizing project.
In the café veranda, there was litter blowing in the wind. People were leaving with paper cups in hand, bags on shoulders. In another hour, the emergency sirens would be blaring the arrival of the great storm. Mahua had just finished talking to her grandmother in Delhi, reassuring her that she would go to a shelter soon. “Yes, Nani, I will be all right, don’t worry.” The current predictions indicated that the cyclone would make landfall about a hundred kilometres north of Mumbai, although it was well known that storms could change course near land very quickly.
On an impulse, she unhooked her Shell and removed her visor, stopping the data streams that fed into her mind every spare moment. She sat breathing, feeling naked without the sensor gear, letting the sounds and sensations of the world waft through her, the old-fashioned way. It had been years since she had played the old game of deliberately letting go, with each breath, a sense of her limited self in order to sport with clouds, waves, and other beings. How strange it felt!
There was the wind, lifting dust and the folds of yesterday’s newspaper, and she could see the dust motes forming shapes, like myriad tiny arms turning sheets of newspaper over and over for some invisible reader. With each unfolding, the papers sighed and whispered. The wind said, “I’m just a breath at this moment, but in a few minutes, I will be a supercyclone.”
There was a tree near her table, leaning a little over her like a dancer caught in a slantwise twirl. The drought had taken most of its leaves, and now its bare branches rattled in the wind. Looking up, she saw the last leaf detach itself from a branch and float unhurriedly down, this way and that, landing to the left of her teacup. It seemed to glow against the dark metal table, trembling for a moment in the breeze. The tip had frayed into a fine lace of veins and branches, but the rest was intact, its very centre still green. It waited, like a gift unopened.
She remembered the leaves of another tree accumulating in the cracks of an old roadway, some years ago in Delhi. Her horoscope in the morning paper, that paper rolling around in the wind, had said she would receive a gift from a stranger. She smiled. “Thanks,” she said to the tree, standing up, pocketing the leaf.
She walked to the water-taxi stand, a covered ledge that had once been a first-floor veranda. The water slapped against the building with a hard, choppy rhythm. The wind was now whipping up in great gusts, and the clouds were low and dark, although it was the middle of the afternoon. Nervously, she looked around, the canal was empty; she must have missed the last of the water taxis. Just then, a small barge came into sight. There were shapes huddled on it, and a single figure was pushing a pole with long, unhurried strokes.
“Arre!” she called. She was surprised to find that the bargeman was a thin boy in a pair of worn shorts, his half-naked body as dark as hers. The others in the barge were children and a couple of old women who sat hunched against the wind gusts in old shawls.
That was when she first met Mohsin. At the moment, he was only another street urchin, with a shock of straight hair and a gap-toothed, wide grin. The metro had been shut down, its entrances sealed against the expected flood. After he dropped her off at the first share-a-ride on dry land, she had asked his name. She waved, never thinking she would see the kid again.
The cyclone, in defiance of meteorological predictions, made landfall that evening in the heart of the city. The winds howled all night, and there were loud crashing sounds as though a party of destructive giants had been let loose. The rain came down hard. Never had the city seen a storm such as this. The lights went out, and throughout the night the storm unleashed its power.
In the afternoon of the next day, the winds died down. Mahua stepped from her small rented room into a changed world.
Mumbai was ravaged. There was shattered glass underfoot and broken windows in the intact buildings. The storm surges were so high that the entire lower part of the city, all the new highways and office blocks and high-rises, were under several feet of water. The sewers had backed up, and overflowing rivers carried raw sewage and tons of trash into the streets. The cyclone had not spared the rich—the opulent minarets of Billionaires’ Row lay toppled, concrete blocks like felled giants, tangled with tree branches, silk curtains, and the bodies of hundreds of staff. The rich had escaped in helicopters. The city leaders returned with their mafia, cracking down on the looters and the desperate, using whatever means at hand to protect their property, but the rest of the city lay abandoned.