Character · Climate Solutions | Named Alongside the Thakurs
Mr Gupta
The man Rohan is travelling to meet about climate solutions for the city — and, by the end, one of the names still out there causing damage.
The reason the journey is also a work trip: a meeting to discuss climate change solutions for the city.
He is Mr Gupta in the book, and the archive had him wrong — filed as a doctor, and illustrated as a woman in a clinic. Both were inventions of the cataloguer.
The meeting does not happen the way it was meant to. Sumati remembers it afterwards as one of the loose threads: we were going to meet with a Mr Gupta, but Papa met a Mr Joshi. Later, the search runs the two names together — cross-reference either a Mr Gupta or a Mr Joshi or both — which is what you do with names when you no longer know which one mattered.
By the end he is not a colleague. He is on a list.
We should also improve our relationships with Mr Gupta and the Thakurs.
— Rohan
We need to address Mr Gupta and the Thakurs as well. They’re still out there, causing damage.
Both sentences are in the book, and the distance between them is the argument the family is having: whether the people running the plants are partners you bring round, or a problem you name.