by Ed Finn
She noticed him on three other occasions at different parts of the city, clicking away at the graffiti with his camera. He was photographing the crowds as much as the graffiti. Just a businessman with a hobby, she told herself. But one day, he dropped his briefcase and papers flew open. There were sheets of accounts, tiny neat numbers in rows, a notepad, a notebook computer, a badly wrapped half-eaten sandwich, and a piece of black chalk. The chalk rolled near where Fernanda was standing. The people near the man were solicitously bending over and picking up his things, but he looked around at the ground wildly. Without thinking Fernanda put her foot over the piece of chalk. She dropped her bag, bent down to retrieve it, and got the chalk in her purse with a fluidity that surprised her. It was hard and oily, not at all like ordinary chalk. There was a loose sheet of paper not far from her that the crowd had missed—she picked it up, hurriedly scribbled an address on it, put her business card and the chalk behind the sheet, and gave the whole thing to the man, looking at him with what she hoped was the innocent gaze of a good citizen. She saw recognition leap into his eyes. Obrigado. He averted his gaze and hurried off.
She spent the rest of the day feeling restless. If only she could reassure him! She wasn’t going to give him away. She’d seen the name of the company where he worked on top of the sheets. Now if only . . .
At home she touched her wristpad, turning on her computer. She scrolled through the news. The tornado in an eastern state of India. Arguments in the United States Senate about the new energy strategy. Floods here, droughts there, the fabric of the biosphere tearing. She thought of the Amazon rain forest, so often called the earth’s green lung. Even some tourist guides in the city, taking their mostly North American charges into the jungle, used that term. Did anyone know what those words meant? She thought of the predictions of several models, that the great forest, currently a massive carbon dioxide sink, might turn into a source of CO2 if it was stressed enough by drought and tree-cutting. What would happen then? “Hell on earth,” she said aloud. She wondered how many people looked up into the sky and imagined, as she did, the invisible river of moisture, the Rios Voadores, roaring in over the Amazon from the Atlantic coast. It thrilled her to think of it: flying river, the anaconda of the sky, carrying as much water as the Amazon, drawn in and strengthened by the pull of the forest so that it flowed across Brazil, hit the Andes, turned south, bringing rain like a benediction. What had human foolishness done to it that there was drought in the Amazon? The green lung had lung cancer. She remembered Claudio’s face in the lamplight at camp, speaking passionately about the violated Atlantica forest, the mutilated Mato Grosso, the fact that nearly seven thousand acres of forest were cleared every year.
“What do you think—are we a stupid species, or what?” she asked the lizard on the wall. The lizard gave her an enigmatic look.
She rested her head on her arms, thinking of Claudio, his physical presence, his kindness. The work they had been doing had drawn them together—maybe the relationship had never been more than that. And yet . . . the work was important. To know whether such reparations would make a difference was crucial. She was usually so positive, so determined despite the immensity of the task. Perhaps it was the drought, the lack of rain when it should be raining buckets every day, that was making her feel like this. “What shall I do to bring the rain?” she asked aloud. The wristpad beeped, and then there was a kid’s voice, distorted by electronic translation software. On the computer screen he was sitting in a hospital bed, his dark, thin face earnest. His ears stuck out.
Sing, he said. Behind the translation she could hear the kid’s real voice speaking an unfamiliar language. He sounded tired. What had he said? Sing, he said again. Sing for the clouds, for the rain. He started to sing in an astonishingly musical voice. She could tell he was untrained, even though the musical style was unfamiliar. But it was strangely uplifting, this music that would bring the rain. She wanted his voice to go on and on, even though the translation software was off-key. Then abruptly the screen went dark.
Where had the kid come from? She had signed on to an experimental social network software device at a friend’s urging, but the kid wasn’t in her list of contacts. The connections were really bad most of the time. She hoped he was all right.
The next day the idea of music bringing the rain still haunted her. Of course such things didn’t happen in the real world—as a scientist, she knew better. The vagaries of the climate were still beyond them, and the reparations, the stitches in the green fabric of the jungle, had just begun. The trouble with repairing the forest was that it would never be enough, without a million other things happening too, like the work at the polar icecaps, and social movements, ordinary people pledging to make lifestyle changes, and governments passing laws so that children and grandchildren could have a future. The crucial thing was to get net global carbon dioxide emissions down to zero, and that would take the participation of nearly everyone. The days of the lone ranger were gone; this was the age of the million heroes.
Still, she opened her saxophone case the next day and caressed the cool metal. It drew her, the music she had put away from her. She hadn’t answered her bandmates’ e-mails. Now she had to run to the lab—maybe this evening, she told her saxophone. We’ll have a date, you and I.
But she never got to the lab, because her colleague Maria called her, excited. As a result she went straight to the home in Cidade Nova with the experimental green roof. She went around the house to the side wall, where a crowd had already gathered. People were getting out of cars, and there was even a TV truck. From behind the foliage cascading down the wall of the house peered a jaguar, a gentle jaguar, sleepy even, at peace with the world. Fernanda let out a long breath. The artist had understood her message. The owner of the house, elderly Victor Gomes, was standing with the crowd, his mouth agape.
Within a few hours, the news spread and the crowd swelled until the traffic became a problem. Sensing an opportunity, she talked briefly and urgently to Victor Gomes, and he gave an impromptu tour of the rooftop garden. Suddenly everyone was talking about green roofs. Imagine, if you went ahead and got one (and there was a grant to help you out with costs if you couldn’t afford it), not only did your air-conditioning bills go down, but maybe, just maybe, the artist would come paint the side of your house.
© 2013, Nina Miller / ASU, adapting content from 2005, Bibloq / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Two days later there was a gala fund-raiser and awareness event at the Hotel Amazonas. Fernanda played with her old band. She put her lips to her saxophone and into each note she poured her yearning for the rain, for a world restored. The music spilled out, clear as light, smooth as flowing water, and she sensed the crowd shift and move with the sound, with her breath. During a break, when she leaned against the side wall of the stage, watching Santiago’s fingers ripple over the piano keyboard, a waiter came up to her and handed her an envelope. Curious, she opened it, and inside was a paper napkin, and an Amazonian butterfly drawn on it, so vivid she half expected it to rise off the napkin. She searched for him in the crowd but there were too many people. Her wristpad beeped. “A butterfly,” she whispered, and she felt the wings of change beating in the light-filled air around her.
“ . . . CAN CAUSE A TORNADO . . .”
“ . . . but scientists now know more than they did only five years ago. We will now speak to an expert . . .”
Can you please turn off the TV? I can’t bear to see anything more about the storm . . . It was the same program this morning.
I am too sad to tell this story. You’ll have to wait a moment.
I am sad because my grandfather the professor died. He was not really my grandfather, but he treated me like I was his own. I called him Dadaji. He let me sleep on the verandah of his bungalow, on a little cot. I felt safe there. I cleaned and cooked for him, and he would talk to me and tell me about all kinds of things. He taught me how to read and write. From the place where I slept I could look down a low
incline to the village, my village.
Are you translating this into English? Does that mean I’ll be famous all over India?
I want to help my village. I want people to know about it, even though it is only a Harijan basti sitting on stony ground. I want to make sure the world knows that we did something good.
Let me tell you about my village. The river is many hours’ walk from us, but the floods are getting worse. Last year during the monsoons the water came into the huts and the fields and drowned everything except what we could carry. The ground where the village sits is very stony, and things don’t grow well. We don’t have fields of our own, not really. We are doms—most of us work in town, or for the big Rajput village—Songaon—two miles away. We do all the dirty work—sweeping and cleaning privies, that sort of thing. Me, I am lucky because the professor employs me and takes care of me and treats me as though I were not a dom. He doesn’t observe caste even though he is a Rajput himself—he says it is already dying out in the towns and cities. He says the government laws protect people like us, but I don’t know about those things because if the Rajputs are angry then they can do what they like to us and nobody can stop them. But the professor, he is a different kind of person—a devata. He even has me cook his food, and pats my head when I do my lessons well—and when there is a festival we share a plate of sweets together.
See this thing I am wearing around my wrist, like a watch? The professor gave it to me. He has been teaching me the computer and this thing makes it come on and we can see and talk to people from around the world. Once I spoke to a man all the way in Chennai—it was very exciting. It was really like magic, because the man didn’t know Bhojpuri or Hindi and the computer translated his words and mine so we could both understand. The translator voices were funny. Mine didn’t sound like me at all.
What I love most is music. In the early morning when the mist lies on the river, the first thing I hear is the birds in the bougainvillea bush. When I bring the tea out on the verandah and we have drunk the first cup, the professor gives me his tanpura to tune. Then he starts to sing Bhairav, which is a morning raga. Listening to him, I feel as though I am climbing up and down mountain ranges of mist and cloud. I feel I could fly. I sing with him, as though my voice is a shadow following his voice. He tells me I have a good ear. It isn’t the same kind of singing as in the movies—it is something deeper that calls to your soul. When I told the professor that, he looked pleased and said that good music makes poets of us. I never thought that just anybody could be a poet.
From his house, I can see all the way to the river far beyond the village. In the last few years we have either had drought or flood. This year seems to be a dry year. Always there is some difficulty we have to deal with. But we have been changing too, ever since the professor came and began to live in his house. He has problems with his sons; they don’t get along, so he lives alone except for me. He and some other people have been working with our basti. The other people are also dalits like us, but they can read and write, and they know how to make the government give them their rights. They have traveled all over the country telling villages like ours that the climate is changing, and we must change too, or we won’t survive. So now we have a village panchayat, and there are three women and two men who speak for all of us. You see, new times are coming, difficult times, when Dharti Mai herself is against us because instead of treating her like a mother, human beings have treated her like a slave. Most of those people who did this are in America and places like that, but they are here too, in the big cities. It is strange because at first we used to think places like that were the best in the world, because of what we saw on TV, but the professor explained that living like that, with no regard for Dharti Mai, comes with costs. Why doesn’t Dharti Mai punish them, then? I asked him that once. Why is she punishing us poor people, who have done nothing to cause the problem? The professor sighed and said that Dharti Mai was punishing everyone. So people ask him all the time, what can we do? This makes the professor happy because he says that earlier most people in our basti just accepted their lot—after all, for thousands of years it has been our lot to suffer. He is pleased because now we want to do something to save ourselves and make the world better. If all those rich, upper-caste people and all the goras have been wrong all this time about how they should live, maybe they’re wrong about us too. Maybe our time has come.
But Bojhu kaku—he’s the one who took me in when my parents died—he says what’s the good in pointing fingers? Even the goras are changing how they live. The question is what can we do to heal Dharti Mai? How can we help each other survive the terrible times that are upon us? So in the village people take turns being lookouts when there is a bad weather forecast, and they help each other more, and they’ve got a teacher to come twice a week to teach them how to read and write. They sent Barki kaki off to the town to be trained by a doctor—she’s the midwife—so that she can help us all be healthier. You should have seen her when she came back, she was so proud—she got to see how they work in the big hospital and she came back with pink soap for everyone. We now have our own hand pump and don’t have to drink river water. All this is because of the professor, and because of people like Bojhu kaku, and Barki kaki—and Dulari mai, even though most people are scared of her temper. The professor and I are treated like royal guests whenever we go to visit. The professor studies people—anthro-pology—and even though he is retired, he hasn’t stopped. He goes around all the local villages, tap-tapping with his cane—he’s got a bad leg—and he tells people about the world.
Which is how we know about how the world is getting hotter, and even the goras are burning up in their big cities with all those cars and TVs. But that is not all. You know there is a big coal-mining company that wants to buy all the land around us? The professor gets angry whenever the coal company is mentioned, so angry he can hardly get a word out. It is burning coal and oil that is making the world hotter and Dharti Mai so angry with us. He says the government, instead of finding ways to use other things, is mining more coal and making more coal plants so that the people in the big cities can have electricity and cars and TVs, which warm the world even more. It sounds to me like when Dhakkan kaka gets drunk, he wants to keep on drinking. So maybe the way the rich people of the world live is like a sickness where they can’t make themselves stop. Also most people in my village don’t want to give up their ancestral land for the coal company, small and poor and stony though it might be, even though the government has promised compensation. That tiny piece of earth is all we have. But some of the young men think that the money would be good, and they can go to the big city and make it big. The professor told them that there are already too many people trying to make it in the city, but behind his back they grumble and talk about the good life they could have. It’s mostly people like Jhingur kaka’s older son, who is a malcontent. The Rajput village—Songaon—doesn’t like the coal-mining idea either and the professor persuaded them to let us join a protest delegation in the town, although we had to keep our distance behind them. The professor sat with us and argued against the coal company from the back. You should have seen how furious the Rajputs were! They respect him for his education and his caste, even though he doesn’t keep caste, but his ways upset them. Later, when we were walking back, one of them told him, “If you weren’t an old man, and learned too, I would take my stick to you, for the example you are setting to our children.” I know, because I heard him. It was Ranbir Singh. He is the one with the biggest mustache and the biggest, stoutest sticks, and the biggest temper. His mood changes so quickly, everyone is afraid of him. He even has guns. The professor just said quietly that if Ranbir Singh did that with every Rajput in the country who had broken caste, he would run out of sticks pretty quickly.
The day it all happened, in the morning we were listening to the classical program on the radio because the professor wanted to hear a new bandish that was playing. There were clouds in the sky but no sign of rain. Just then
we heard a roaring sound. The radio crackled and the announcer said something about an unusual cloud formation. The sound of the wind became so strong that we couldn’t hear the radio. The sky became dark, even though over the river it was still light. There was a tapping sound over our heads: hail! I was very excited. Hail has fallen only once in my village in my lifetime. I ran down the verandah steps to collect some, and then I saw the storm.
I had never seen anything like it. I saw a whirling monster towering in the fields behind the house, like a top spun out of clouds and wind. The professor looked alarmed. He said he had heard of things like this in other lands, and that it was called a tur-nado. He said we would be all right in a pukka house like his, but then he stared out into the distance toward my village. People were coming out of their homes and getting ready to walk to Songaon or the town for the long day of work.
“Bhola,” he said to me, “I am going to check on the computer what we should do. Get ready to run down to the village and warn people.”
“Dadaji, will you be all right?” He’s an old man, and lame, too. But he pushed me impatiently off, saying of course he would be fine. That’s the last thing he said to me.
I ran down toward the village. The wind was strong, and I saw a crow in the sky struggling to keep its wings under control. It swooped down in a big arc and came right at me, flapping its wings, and hit me in the stomach. I grabbed it and held it to my chest—a full-grown crow. I thought it was dead, but I couldn’t just throw it away. So I held it to my chest and I ran.
