Village to village, town to town, temple to temple, from the huge complexes the size of cities to white-washed roadside shrines. Then one day outside a mall in a drought-dusty suburb of Jaipur, as the security men were coming to ask me politely (for one must always be respectful to sadhus) to please move on, I saw what I had been looking for. A man turned to see the very small kerfuffle and as I momentarily looked at him, the Eye of Shiva looked back. I saw biotechnology move there.
I went to a community centre and wrote my first article. I sent it to Suresh Gupta, the editor of Gupshup, that most unashamedly populist of the Delhi’s magazines, which had carried the photographs of my birth and marriage and now, unknowingly, my prophecies of the coming Age of Kali. He rejected it out of hand. I wrote another the next day. It came back with a comment: Interesting subject matter but inaccessible for our readership. I was getting somewhere. I went back and wrote again, long into the night over the pad. I am sure I gained another nickname: the Scribbling Sadhu. Suresh Gupta took that third article, and every article since. What did I write about? I wrote about all the things Shiv had prophesied. I wrote about what they might mean for three Indian families, the Voras, the Dashmukhs and the Hirandanis, village, town and city. I created characters – mothers, fathers, sons and daughters and mad aunties and uncles with dark secrets and long-lost relatives come to call – and told their stories, week upon week, year upon year, and the changes, good and ill, the constant hammerblows of technological revolution wrought upon them. I created my own weekly soap opera; I even dared to call it Town and Country. It was wildly successful. It sold buckets. Suresh Gupta saw his circulation increase by thirty per cent among those Delhi intelligentsia who only saw Gupshup in hair salons and beauty parlours. Questions were asked, who is this pseudonymous ‘Shakyamuni’? We want to interview him, we want to profile him, we want him to appear on Awadh Today, we want an op-ed piece from him, we want him to be an adviser on this project, that think tank, we want him to open a supermarket. Suresh Gupta fielded all such inquiries with the ease of a professional square leg. There were others questions, ones I overheard at train stations and phatphat lines, in supermarket queues and at bazaars, at parties and family get-togethers: What does it mean for us?
I kept travelling, kept walking, immersing myself in the village and small town. I kept writing my little future-soap, sending off my articles from a cellpoint here, a village netlink there. I watched for the Eye of Shiva. It was several months between the first and second, down in a business park in Madhya Pradesh. I saw them steadily after that, but never many; then, at the turn of 2049 to 2050, like a desert blooming after rain, they were everywhere.
I was walking down through the flat dreary country south of the Nepalese border to Varanasi developing my thoughts on evolution, Darwinian and post-Darwinian and the essential unknowability of singularities when I picked up the message from Sarasvati, my first in two weeks of loitering from village to village. At once I thumbed to Varanasi and booked the first shatabdi to Delhi. My natty dreads, my long nails, the dirt and sacred ash of months on the road went down the pan in the first class lounge. By the time the Vishwanath Express drew into the stupendous nano-diamond cocoon of New Delhi Central I was dressed and groomed, a smart, confident young Delhiwallah, a highly eligible teenager. Sarasvati picked me up in her truck. It was an old battered white Tata without autodrive or onboard or even a functioning air-conditioning system. New Delhi Women’s Refuge was painted on the side in blue. I had followed her career – or rather her careers- while I was running the country. Worthiness attracted her; had she been a Westerner and not a Delhi girl I would have called it guilt at the privilege of her birth. Theatre manager here, urban farming collective there, donkey sanctuary somewhere else, dam protest way way down there. She had derided me: deep down at the grass roots was where the real work was done. People work. And who will provide the water for those grass roots? I would answer. It had only taken our brother’s vision of the end of the Age of Kali for me to come round to her philosophy.
She looked older than the years I had spent wandering, as if those my youthfulness belied had been added to hers by some karma. She drove like a terrorist. Or maybe it was that I hadn’t travelled in a car, in a collapsing Tata pick-up, in a city, in Delhi… No, she drove like a terrorist.