The Ministry for the Future

78

He flew into Lucknow and got on the train into the city and then took the subway and bus out to the branch of the City Montessori school that he had gone to as a child. Biggest school in the world, winner of a UNESCO Peace Prize, it had been a turning point in his life for sure. His father having married a Nepali woman, he could have ended up in Nepal forever, in a Rawang hill village where the police station had been blown up by Maoists and never rebuilt. His father had been stubborn and had not wanted to expose his wife to the pressures of Lucknow. The second-happiest city in India could be tough on hill folk. So he could have lived his whole life in the middle ages, trapped by parents who had met through a young man’s desperate matrimonial answered by a girl who could read and write, and dream.

But a German had passed through with an aid group, and when he got caught stealing from them, by no means the worst of his boyhood crimes, it was Fritz who sat him down and interrogated him, as stern as a policeman, but cheerful too, skeptical of his badness, unconvinced by his tough demeanor. Fritz said to him, firmly but kindly, To get anywhere in this world you must hitch your tiger to your chariot. No more stealing, that only hurts you. You’re clever and you have a burning desire, I can see that in you, so use your cleverness and get yourself a freeship to a school in a city. That way you’ll get what you want without hurting people. Learn all you can in your school here, that won’t be much of a challenge for you, I can see that. And then Fritz had spoken to his father, saying, Send this boy to the city. Give him a chance. And his father had done it and he had ended up in Lucknow, his father’s home town.

The city amazed him, it stunned him. It was such an upgradation of his fortunes that he had not slept more than three hours a night for the rest of his childhood and youth, and all because of the violence of the spin of thoughts in his head, the day’s inrush tumbling up there like clothes in a washer. Lucknow: now luck. The place had made him.

And now he was back. He wandered away from his old school, off into the tight dense neighborhood south of it, the crush of old buildings caught between the subway line and the river, between the present and his past. He had done a lot of stupid things here. Despite the city’s many exhilarations he had not discontinued the truant ways of his Nepali childhood, he couldn’t remember why. Chain-snatching, market theft; maybe all that had been somehow a way to stay connected to home. His parents would have beaten him had they known what he did in the city, so senselessly endangering everything, but maybe the danger of it had been part of the allure. He liked doing it, and he liked the toughs he did it with. He was one of them. They reminded him of himself. He was a hill beast, no city could tame him. He took what he wanted and no one could stop him. Only a close call entailing a broken arm had slowed him down. And then when he moved to Delhi he had changed again, given up all that kind of thing. Again he couldn’t remember why he had done it, how he had justified it to himself. It was just the way he had been then. Things happened. Even though he had rarely slept in Lucknow, he had not really ever woken up until he moved to Delhi. At that point many things came clear, and he never looked back.

Now he was back. He wanted to look back. He walked across town to his school and spoke to the assembled students, and all the young faces were enough to slay him on the spot. Talk about burning desire. They wanted what he had, and he didn’t know what to say to them. He said, To get anywhere in this world you must hitch your tiger to your chariot.

He went out with them to the fields outside the city where they were working in the India Regenerative Agriculture job guarantee program. There was full employment in India now, and the work was hard but it was scientifically based too, and drawing carbon into the soil year by year in ways making them all safer. He worked with them planting corn and then repairing a terrace wall, and ended the day feeling cooked. I’m still a hill boy, he told them, I can’t hack the terai, it’s too hot. But look you, this is good work you are doing, so you must persist. Gandhi made up this word, satyagraha, that’s Sanskrit for peace force, you all know this word, right? But the Mahatma made it up himself, and I think he would be happy to imagine another word that puts the two parts in reverse order. Grahasatya. Force peace. It changes it from a noun to a verb, maybe. And you are exerting that force for peace. The work that you do here helps save the world, it forces peace on the world. Keep at it.

Then as he was preparing to leave, he got a note handed to him in the street requesting a meeting. And this was interesting enough to pursue. Indeed he had wanted to speak to some of these people and had not been able to figure out a safe way to reach them. So he went to the address on the note.

When he got there he was startled and amused to find it was just one street away from the very intersection where he had spent much of his truant youth, the same X of alleyways meeting at a big plus sign of crossing avenues. A very messy intersection, as messy as his young mind and life had been, the same tram wires overhead, same narrow wrought iron balconies on the buildings. It gave him a little smile to think the people he was meeting, no doubt some of this generation’s young toughs, had accidentally called him back to his old neighborhood.

These were not the same kind of people he had been, however. They had a purpose; their burning desire was already directed, hitched to a chariot outfitted for war. They stepped out of a doorway and gestured to him to follow them into an empty tea stall. They were older than he had been, and a woman led them. His childhood gang had been happy and boisterous; these people were angry and cautious. Of course: lives were at stake, theirs included. And they had probably been in the heat wave. That would change you. Forged in the fire: yes, these were Children of Kali, staring at him as if calculating where to insert the knives.

We want you to stand up, the woman told him bluntly.

And I want you to stand down, he replied, as mildly as he could.

She frowned heavily, as did the four men with her. They looked like the demon faces on Kali’s necklace.

You don’t tell us what to do, she said. You’re like firangi now.

I am not, he said. You don’t know what I am. You know enough to ask to meet with me, I’ll give you that, but that’s all you know.

We see what’s happening. We brought you here to tell you to do more.

And I came when you asked, to tell you the time has come to change tactics. That’s a good thing, and it’s partly because of what you did. You were doing the needful, I know that.

We are still doing the needful, she said.

It’s a question of what’s needful now, he said.

We will decide that, she said.

He looked at each of them in turn. He felt how it could be more intimidating than anything one might say. It was almost like touching them; like an electric spark jumping the gap from mind to mind. A hard look; but he let them see him, too.

Listen, he told them. I understand you. I’ve helped you, I’ve helped work like yours all over the world. That’s why you asked me to meet with you. And it’s why I agreed to meet with you. I am putting myself in your hands here, to make you understand I am your ally. And to tell you that conditions have changed. Together we helped to change them. So now, if you keep killing the wicked ones, the criminals, now that all the worst of them are dead, then you become one of them.

The worst criminals are not dead, there are many more of them, she said fiercely.

They always find replacements, he said.

We do too.

I know that. I know your sacrifice.

Do you?

He stared at her. Again he shifted his stare one by one to the men with her. Faces to fear, faces to love. That burning desire.

He said slowly, This is Lakshmi’s city. I grew up here. I hope you know that. I grew up right here in this neighborhood, when it was far tougher than it is now.

You weren’t here in the heat wave, the woman said.

He stared at her, feeling a strain inside him that might break him apart. His whole life was cracking inside him. Trying to control that, he unsteadily said, I’ve done more to stop the next heat wave than anyone you have ever met. You’ve done your part, I’ve done mine. I was working for this neighborhood long before the heat wave struck, and I’ll keep doing that work for the rest of my life.

May you live ever so long, one of the men said.

That’s not the point, he said. My point is, I see things you can’t see from here, and I’m your ally, and I’m telling you, it’s time to change. The big criminals are dead or in jail, or in hiding and rendered powerless. So now if you keep killing, it’s just to kill. Even Kali didn’t kill just to kill, and certainly no human should. Children of Kali should listen to their mother.

We listen to her, but not you.

He said, I am Kali.

Suddenly he felt the enormous weight of that, the truth of it. They stared at him and saw it crushing him. The War for the Earth had lasted years, his hands were bloody to the elbows. For a moment he couldn’t speak; and there was nothing more to say.