I was obsolete. All the talents and skills Mamaji and Dadaji had gifted me were nothing in a world where everyone was connected, where everyone could access the full power of a universal computer, where personality could be as malleable and fluid as water. Slowly slowly I would grow up through adolescence to maturity and old age while around me this new society, this new humanity, would evolve at an ever-increasing rate. I was all too aware of my choice. Take Shiv’s way and deny everything I had been made for, or reject it and grow old with my kind. We, the genetically enhanced Brahmins, were the last humans. Then, with a physical force that made me spasm on the back seat of the limo, I realised my hubris. I was such an aristocrat. The poor. The poor would be with us. India’s brilliant middle class, its genius and its curse, would act as it always had, in its unenlightened self-interest. Anything that would give advantage to its sons and daughters in the Darwinian struggle for success. The poor would look on, as disenfranchised from that post-human world as they were from this fantasy of glass and neon.
I was glad, glad to tears, that I had chosen to pass nothing on into this future. No endless chain of slow-aging, genetically obsolete Brahmins hauling themselves into an increasing unrecognisable and inhuman future. Had I received some premonition? Had my uniquely overlapping senses seen a pattern there all those years ago that even Shiv, with his clandestine access to the collected knowledge of the Generation Threes, had not? I wept unreservedly and ecstatically in the back of the smooth-running car. It was time. As we turned into the down ramp to the underground car park at Ramachandra Tower, I made three calls. First I called Prime Minister Srivastava and tendered my resignation. Then I called Lakshmi, patient Lakshmi who had through our charade of a marriage and sterility become a dear and intimate friend, and said, Now, now’s the time for that divorce. Last of all I called my mother on the floor above and told her exactly what I had done with myself.
A father festooned with memory
Wait! One more trick. You’ll like this trick, the best trick of all. You haven’t seen anything yet, just a bit of running in circles and jumping through hoops. Yes, I know it’s very very late and the sun will soon be up the sky and you have cows to milk and fields to tend to and appointments to keep but you will like this trick. Not a lot, but you will like it. Now, two ticks while I fix up this wire.
And anyway, I haven’t finished my story. Oh no no, not by a long chalk. You thought it ended there? With the world as you see it, now you know how intimately I am involved in our history? No, it must end well, a well-made story. I must confront the villain, according to the theories on such things. There must be resolution and an appropriate moral sentiment. Then you will be satisfied.
The wire? Oh, they can walk that. Oh yes, those cats. No no no; first you must listen a little longer.
I walked away. We have a great and grand tradition of it in this great teat of divine milk hanging from the belly of Asia. Our country is big enough to swallow any soul, our orders still porous to pilgrims with a stick and a dhoti wrapped around their loins. Our society has a mechanism for disappearing completely. Anyone can walk away from the mundane world into the divine. Mine was not the orthodox spiritual path and not conventionally divine. I had seen the coming gods. I set aside my career, my clothes, my apartment, my wife – with her blessing and a farewell kiss – my family and friends, my identity, my social networks, my online presence, everything but my genetic inheritance which could not be undone and turned sadhu. Only Sarasvati knew my secret com address. I was gone from the apartment, beating through the neon-lit heat of Rajiv Circle, out along the sides of expressways, drenched in yellow light, beneath the back-throttle of aircraft coming in to the airport, past the brick and cardboard and plastic shelters of the invisible poor. Dawn saw me among the ribbed aluminium flanks of the go-downs and factories of Tughluk. I crossed a city on foot in a single night. It’s a great and strange thing to do. Everyone should do it. I walked along the cracked concrete spans of expressways, by the sides of country roads blasted by the grit and gust of passing trucks, along the side of the huge slow trains materialising like visions out of the heat haze, the drivers flinging me rupees for blessings as they passed. I sat down and covered my head and eyes as the high-speed shatabdi express blasted past at hundreds of kilometres per hour. Did the passengers even glance at me through the darkened glass? If so I must have seemed a very strange sadhu to them. The littlest sadhu. Small but determined, beating forward with my staff at every stride.
What was I doing? Walking. What did I hope to find? Nothing. Where was I going? To see. Don’t think me a coward or a failure, that I was walking away from truths I could not admit. I had been stabbed to the bone by the revelation that I was irrelevant. I was not the future. I was a dead-end, a genetic backwater. That was the natural reaction of privilege to its absolute irrelevance. I’m a brat, remember that. A spoiled Mamaji’s boy. That same night I returned and dropped my progenitive bombshell, that my mother would never have the dynasty of brilliant Brahmins she desired, I woke from my sleep. It was the uncertain hour, when reality is groggy and the djinns run free. The hour when you wake in your familiar bed without the least knowledge of where the hell you are. I was woken by a sound. It was like a breath and like a roar, like traffic and air-conditioners, like a distant desperate shouting and the buzz of neons and powerlines. It was the pulse of underground trains and delivery trucks; it was filmi music and item-songs playing through each other. I heard Great Delhi breath in its shallow sleep and I wanted to go to my balcony and shout as loud as my eleven-year-old glottis would allow: Wake up! Wake up! Shiv’s future might be inevitable, written into the geometry of space-time by entities outside it, but I would not allow us to sleepwalk into it. My mind was racing. I had never known anything like it before. I was thinking at a staggering rate, images and memories and ideas crashing together, shattering, fusing. Edifices of thought, huge as mountains, tumbled around me. The way was clear and bright and laid out in front of me. It was there complete and entire in two seconds. I would have to take myself away from the distractions of Delhi politics and society. My ambitions were much larger than that, I would have to become anonymous for a time, I would have to be silent and look and listen. There was a war to be fought and it was a war of mythologies.
Lakshmi kissed me and I left. I wandered for nine months, south across the border into Rajasthan, back into Bharat and to the north under the breath of the Himalayas, to the cool green ridges where I had spent my honeymoon with Lakshmi. To Dal Lake and Srinagar, to Leh and the high country. I could never grow the proper sadhu beard, but I grew the sadhu leanness and tallness. Boy eunuchs grow tall and lean. And the dreadlocks. Oh yes. They are good to have but unpleasant to get. I also gained a nickname: the Beardless Sadhu. With it I got muscles and sunburn, I grew the stamina to walk all day on a cup of rice and a cup of water. What a pulpy, unfit puppy I had been! I begged and performed small miracles of accountancy and feats of memory for food and shelter. Everywhere, I looked in men and women’s third eyes. I saw things I could never have from the top of Ramachandra Tower or the Awadh Bhavan. I saw thirst and I saw drought. I saw good village leaders and diligent local civil servants frustrated by government bureaucrats. I saw clever women turn a few hundred rupees from microcredit schemes and grameen banks into successful businesses. I saw good teachers try to lift generations out of low expectations and the trap of caste and Awadh’s soar-away middle class, rapidly pulling the ladder of social mobility up behind it. I helped with harvests and rode the back of tractors and listened to farmers curse the ever-increasing price of their sterile GM seed. I chased rats with sticks and waved my arms to set whole fields of sparrows to flight. I sat in the community house and watched cricket on a giant plasma screen powered by stored sunlight. Oh, I was a most peculiar sadhu. I gained a new nickname to set beside Beardless Sadhu: Cricketing Sadhu. I saw village weddings and festivals, I saw funerals. I saw death. It came quite unexpectedly one day, in a small town outside Agra. It was Holi and the streets were full of flying colour, jets of dye, clouds of powder, stained saris and white shirts ruined beyond the power of any laundry to save and everywhere grinning faces stained with colours, teeth white, eye flashing, everyone shouting Holi hai! Holi hai! as they launched jets of colour into the air. I moved through this circus of colour, as motley as any. The phatphat was grossly overloaded, a dozen colour-stained youths hanging off every strut and stanchion. Their eyes were wide on ganja and they were roaring with laughter and throwing fistfuls of dye powder at every passer-by. They caught me full in the face. The front wheel hit a pothole, the overstrained suspension collapsed and the whole thing flipped over in a perfect somersault onto its roof, which split like an egg. Bodies flew everywhere, many of them so relaxed on the ganja they were still laughing as they picked themselves up and skipped away. One didn’t move. He was trapped under the crushed plastic shell. He lay on his back, his arms at odd angles. His face was stained blue and green and pink and he seemed to be smiling but my senses realised he was dead. I had never seen death before. It was so simple and strange, here undeniably before me yet so subtle, an instant’s transformation yet the opposite of everything that was life. I mumbled the prayers expected of me, but inwardly I was coming to terms with the deepest of all human truths. I was twenty-six years old with the body of an albeit-strange thirteen-year-old, my lifespan was measurable in centuries, but one day I too would lie down like this and stop moving and thinking and feeling and be nothing forever. I saw death and began to understand.