A NEW WORLD

ARUNJI COULD NO longer rely on the noise of construction to wake him in the mornings, so he set his alarm clock for 6 a.m. to wait for the call. He knew it would come soon. And that he would be one of the first to be informed of Nitin’s passing.

But 10 a.m. came and went, and then lunch, and still there had been no call. Neel was angry on the phone last night. Maybe because I could be no help to them.

He decided to call Siddharth instead.

‘What news of the wedding party?’ he asked.

‘Not good,’ Siddharth replied. Arunji waited for the announcement …

‘Nitin nearly passed away last night.’

‘Nearly?’

‘Yes.’

‘But he’s better?’

‘Good God, why do you think he wouldn’t be?’

Of course. Siddharth has the power.

Arunji’s surprise was loud for all its missing utterances.

‘You told them that he was going to pass away last night?’ Siddharth was concerned now.

‘No. I would never have done such a thing – that’s not how I do my work. But Neel did call …’ Arunji tried to blank out his thoughts so there would be no trail that led to any kind of prediction. No hint of shameful shock or relief to give away the fact that Nitin’s survival past his mathematical deadline was unimaginable.

‘Something he ate, that’s all. Savitri had been taking him out to eat on the streets and to Old Delhi from the day he arrived.’

‘My God.’ He adjusted his words. ‘Thank God.’

Siddharth immediately read the backstory to Arunji’s tangible relief.

‘So you really predicted that Nitin was going to die last night?’

‘Yes.’ There was no point lying now.

‘Then we are very lucky that our old rules no longer hold true.’

‘Perhaps some of them do …’

Siddharth realised he might have sounded cruel. ‘At least we should be grateful that mystery will always remain mysterious.’

‘Yes.’

I checked my calculations. I rechecked them.

Siddharth continued, ‘You’re finding it hard to believe this, no?’

‘It’s impossible.’

‘Many things that we believe are impossible are going to come about.’ It was the futurist, not the astrologer, making predictions now.

Siddharth could feel his brother’s grip on the world failing, and it reminded him of his persistent cosmic dream about taking his hands off the wheel of that driverless car. He thought about all the convincing numbers that would have to cohere to create such an unimaginable feat: a car that actually drove itself, with all the sensors and data and satellites at work. And yet the real mystery remained in that moment of lifting one’s hands from the wheel – lifting them and observing the survival of the self.

‘We must always continue to believe in greater miracles,’ Siddharth went on. He was thinking about what must have taken place for his children in Rajasthan. If Arunji was correct – if they really had just turned a corner at the edge of the world – then they had engaged with that future mystery, with all its natural elegance and timeliness and promise. So simple. And yet complex beyond the imaginings of numbers.

Seven days after Neel and Mae’s wedding, when the moon had shed a quarter of its fullness, Nitin was well enough to sit up and eat rice and yoghurt and sugar with the others for breakfast. They were all in a beautiful place once more, sitting on the roof of their hotel under a friendly sun, near the ramparts of the fortress in an entirely new world.

‘Do you remember anything?’ Neel asked.

‘Nah, sorry, mate. Nothing except Savitri’s presence – that’s all.’

‘Do you remember talking to the man on a black buffalo?’

‘What the hell?’

‘Because you were talking to him, you know. You were having a fantastic negotiation for your soul.’

‘Sorry, mate. Don’t remember having any yarn with any fellas on black buffalos.’

‘You should have heard yourself raving …’

‘It was worse when we heard you’d stopped raving,’ Winsome said. ‘So scary.’

‘Could you hear the doctor say we’d lost you?’

‘Did you see a tunnel, like they say you do?’ Neel asked.

‘Maybe … dunno … I just remember Savitri. I had to come back because I saw her pregnant.’ He tried to change the subject in case he was taken back to that moment. ‘Anyway, how was your wedding?’ It came out wrong. As if he hadn’t really attended.

‘You were there,’ Mae replied. ‘You tell us. What was your favourite bit of it?’

Winsome laughed. ‘That’s not fair. That’s like asking Gayatri.’ She was practising the sound of her baby’s name. The word emerged as more beautiful and suitable every time she said it.

‘Oh, is that her name?’

Nitin tried to remember something nice to say about the wedding but couldn’t conjure up anything that was pleasant.

‘I’m glad it really happened this time round.’

Yet even as he said these words, he couldn’t be sure that the wedding had been anything more than a hallucination. He couldn’t know for a fact that he had even attended, as if the sickness had created in him a parallel persona that would never be fully remembered or recovered in the state of consciousness he now held.

Arunji kept calling Siddharth for confirmation that Nitin’s recovery was sustained. (Yes, he has had food many times now. He’s asking for more. His bowel movements have returned – yes, thank you for asking – and he’s walking, too. And for the further calls: yes, yes and yes.)

Absolutely unfathomable. It was as if the new world had no place for an astrologer. As if he’d been asked to evacuate the premises of the present to make way for the new, haphazard construction of an unpredictable future.

He thought about what could be worth dying for and what might be worth protecting forever in this new century. The hopes of the worthiest ancestors. Memories of the Golden Age. He had no wife and no children, so his line was finished – there was no caste of dhobis to continue slapping wet clothes against rocks with soap. The washing machine had reforged lives.

He rang Siddharth once more. Yes, Nitin was still alive. The two parents had flown out to Jaisalmer to be with the children and their friends.

Irrefutable.

Why, I too have survived to witness the birth of the new India.

When the survival was indisputably confirmed, he began to wonder about the dozens of other predictions he’d banked on for the future, and pondered what might have survived among those as he navigated this new country with its ancient stories and rules and temples for landmarks, its castes and creeds and primordial music. What, among all the wreckage … the liberalisation and deregulation … the corruption … the new money … and even more new money, and the lavish farmhouses in Delhi’s food bowls and the new empires beyond in Gurgaon – what about those? What might be immortal … what might be worth saving in this new India? This new world? What scraps of sentiment? What beauty in the forgotten lore? What fragments of cloth, or vermilion dust from the rituals performed daily for millennia past? What, if anything, should be preserved like a flower worth keeping, and pressed between the pages of an eternal book?