In the midst of the devastation, Mahua found herself volunteering with a rescue group that was an offshoot of a local cooperative called Hilo Mumbai. They were not like other groups she had come across, a motley mix of autorickshaw drivers, some laid-off young actors, retired schoolteachers, street cleaners, and students. How had they come together? Through a poetry workshop for Mumbai’s underprivileged, one of the schoolteachers explained. An elderly autorickshaw driver, Hemant, had started it in Dharavi years ago, and it was still running, with offshoots all over the city.
Along with Hilo Mumbai, Mahua searched through the rubble for survivors, helped transport the injured to local clinics, and dispensed essential supplies when they could get them. The stench of rotting corpses, the cholera outbreaks in the lower parts of the city, made daily life nearly impossible. But the members of Hilo Mumbai worked and laughed and wept together, yelled at and comforted each other—and kept working. Something shifted in Mahua then. She had thought that getting educated and rising into the ranks of the urban middle class was the only way to bring change to the world. But here were people who didn’t have half her education or means, and look at them! She remembered something Raghu had said a few years ago—that change, positive social change, came from the margins. Maybe sometimes that was true. She needed to talk to him, but he was still out of touch, wandering the country.
Months later, back in Delhi, she found the leaf from the tree near the café between the pages of a notebook. It had almost completely worn down to a fine and delicate web. The rest of the leaf matter was a brown powder that had stained the pages. She picked it up by the stem and held it against the light. A web—the parts connected to make the whole. Then she put it back and closed the book.
She thought of the great storm, the towers of the rich toppled by the cyclone. Poetry in the midst of the grimness of rescue work. Maybe I’ll go back there someday.
In the meantime, there was Ashapur. It grew slowly. A marriage of ancient and modern, the buildings rounded, thick-walled, made from mud, straw, and rice husk, the inner roads for people and bicycles, the outer ones for buses that connected them to the greater city. Here, there was room for groves of jamun and neem trees, for gardens on the building walls and roofs. Each domicile held families related by blood and by choice, up to fifty people under one roof, cooking together in large common kitchens.
The Sensornet connected building to building, and wearing a Shell unit or data visor allowed a person to eavesdrop on the data flow: the carbon capture rates of green corridors, fluctuations in the biodiversity index, the conversations between buildings and the energy grid. The city government had donated the space because the site was a refuse dump at the edge of a dying Yamuna, and the deal was that the basti would displace the slum that had grown on the dump. Mahua kept her promise by inviting the slum dwellers to be the first residents of Ashapur. They were refugees from the coastal areas of Bangladesh, Bengal and Odisha, escaping violence and privation, as well as the rising seas and salinization of arable land. They brought to the project their survival skills, their traditions and cultures, their ingenuity and desire to learn. Now they had become the basti’s first residents.
When she and her grandmother had almost given up hope of seeing Raghu again—he had been traveling the country for several years now with hardly a message or call to break the silence—he appeared on their doorstep as abruptly as he had left. Over a vast lunch, he told them about living with rebel groups, tailing corporate mafias, living with tribals in the still-surviving forests, joining a maverick scientist’s efforts to free a river trapped under a town. He looked abashed when Mahua’s grandmother scolded him for his long silence.
“Naniji, I’m going to do better from now on. I’ll ask your forgiveness first, then commit the crime!”
“What mischief are you planning now, you reckless boy?”
“I’m going on an even greater journey, Naniji! Across the world—to Brazil!”
He took Mahua out for a drink and explained. “Mahua, you’ve done fantastic work here in Ashapur. But in my travels, I kept thinking—there is one gap we haven’t jumped, between the Sensornet and the web of life itself. Then, an idea came to me in a Gond village in MP. I want to sensorize an entire forest. Not just sensors in trees, measuring carbon capture, but sensors measuring a hundred things in a whole forest. The biggest remaining forest on Earth is the best place to start. That’s why I’m going to the Amazon.”
She stared at him, stunned. He grinned at her. “The thing is, Gaia theorists—I mean the old idea of Earth as an organism, not fucking Gaiacorp—Gaia theorists have long maintained that the Earth is like a superorganism. That the fungal network through which trees in a forest communicate—which you talked about sensorizing in Ashapur last week—might result in an emergent large-scale intelligence, a thinking forest, that we can’t yet recognize because we can’t conceptualize it. So, sitting in that Gond village, I got the idea that sensorizing a forest is only the first step. Maybe if the sensors are networked right, we can get the forest to become aware of the Sensornet to communicate with it, and therefore with us!”
His eyes shone. “Imagine, Mahua, the forests of the Sahyadris, the Terai, the Amazon, they’re all in trouble because of climate change. Droughts and species extinction. The web of life is collapsing. If we could only communicate with a forest! If it could tell us what was happening in time for us to save it—”
“But we can already figure that out from the sensor data, Raghu! And we still haven’t solved the problem of scaling up the bastis, and I think that’s more important at the moment—”
That was the last she had seen of him. There had been a few letters from Rio de Janeiro and Manaus, but they had got more and more infrequent until she stopped expecting them. After that, silence. More than forty years of it.
In that time, she had seen most of the old megapolises die through the combined machinations of extreme weather and human greed. She had seen hundreds of Ashapurs rise on the ruins, each adapted to its local ecology, yet linked together via the large-scale Sensornet. She had wanted to tell Raghu that despite a decade of killer heat waves in Delhi, the basti clusters might just have shifted the regional climate in the right direction. Maybe we averted that future you saw in the simulator. There was so much she had wanted to share with him! The subcontinent had gone through a long period of chaos and even now, there were mass starvations, violent conflicts, in towns and provinces ruled by brutal mafias where life was precarious. But everywhere else, she could see the fruits of a million mutinies, experiments in alternative ways of living and being, the work and sweat and tears that had resulted in the Great Turning.
She was grateful she had lived to see the change. That she had been a part of it, a catalyst, should have been a source of satisfaction to her now in her old age. But for a few years she had become disenchanted with her work. Not that it hadn’t been important, but she was dissatisfied, impatient with her own thoughts and ideas. She would look at her fine, dark hands, see the lines on her face, feel the ache in her knees, and she would be filled with wonder. The muscles of her heart, her limbs and sinews, had served her without many complaints through the long arc of her life. Now, with these aches and tremors, lines and wrinkles, her body was telling her something. A reminder of mortality, yes, but something else. For some time now, she had stopped wearing her Shell or her data visor, wanting to listen without intermediaries to the subtle speeches of her physical self.