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
