It is peak summer noon in the Chambal valley, in central India. It feels like a 100 square-mile saucepan of boiling water. I am no stranger to heat; As a journalist covering environmental issues, I have spent months in the Death Valley, the Sonoran and Saharan deserts. But this place is something else. Chambal Valley has trees sprinkled here and there; emaciated things that cling to life with great tenacity. But there is no respite from the relentless heat even in their shade. Add to this, the red ants whose bites leave scores of welts all over my body. It has been more than six hours since I stepped off a truck here in the middle of this valley.  I am here to see a farmer, who has slowly become a force to reckon with in the year 2030 geopolitics.

I see him through my binoculars. He is at least a mile away, so it will be a while for him to get here. He is very reclusive, and would only talk to me in in a remote wide-open rendezvous point, not in his farm. So I am stuck wilting away in this heat.

He lives here with his clan. He is a farmer, mechanic, and some kind a visionary. People from far away places such as Sri Lanka, China and Malaysia know of him.  They call him Car Baba!  I would like to know what makes him such a star among his followers. I was in New Delhi a short while ago, and saw his face smiling back from every wall and vehicle.

What has that got to do with environmental journalism? Quite a bit actually: he fits into this larger global movement that has tumbled governments and bankrupted the energy and automobile industries in the last decade. I have been tracking the operatives of this covert organization that, I am convinced, is behind the peaceful uprising the world over. I suspect that this man is a key figure in that organization.

I watch him hobble over to the old fig tree, where I sit sweating and brushing away the ants. It is 110 degrees in the shade, and he hands me a flask that is filled with piping hot Chai. He is tall, but a damaged ankle steals a full foot away from his height. He walks with a painful-looking limp. The constant strain of limping, and cultivating this rocky land has taken a toll. Leathery skin hangs off his gaunt face. Bushy eyebrows cast a shadow over the eyes that sit in sunken sockets. If there could be a human equivalent to an old Hyena, it would be him. I find it hard to believe that he could inspire a revolution, and suspect if I may have been misled by my sources.

“Hello. Heard you wanted to meet me,” He asks me in hindi. His deep voice surprises me. He speaks purposefully, weighing his words carefully. His voice would definitely make people take notice.

I nod, and thank him for the chai.

“How may I help you, Madam?”

I ask him if he knew who I was.

“Yes. You are that reporter lady who wrote about the last of the tigers dying in the Sunderbans. It was indeed a very sad story. ”

He has touched a raw nerve with the mention of the tigers. It was a story I covered a few months ago. I was trying to rescue a pair of beautiful young Sunderban tigers, the last of their species. They were marooned in a mangrove on the swamps of the eastern coast of India. A rapid increase in the sea levels had cut off all escape routes.  They drowned by the time I could get them to safety. I witnessed a species go extinct, right before my eyes. I wrote about it in National Geographic magazine. Oprah and Sasha Obama were moved by it, and soon the story went viral. It launched what I call a biblical Ark moment: a United Nations mandate to protect at least a pair of every species on the planet. Despite all the positive attention to the issue, I blame myself for the extinction of those tigers; it was a raw wound. His comment brought it all back to me. I stopped to collect myself, and changed the topic. I ask him if he read the news or watched TV lately.

He answers wearily, “Madam, I am 5^th class fail. I don’t know any English to read fancy papers. In any case, I have no time. My grandson is a fan of your work; he told me. He wants to be a reporter just like you.”

I ask him about his family.

How many children did he have?  Ten.

Grandchildren? Thirty.

Great grandchildren? Ten.

He also has fifty aunts, uncles and cousins living with him. I tell him it is really nice that he has his entire family living with him, in this age where children drift away as soon as they are old enough. 

“I am lucky. It’s god’s will that I have such a loving family.”

I say I only knew him by the name his followers called him: Car baba.

“That is just what people call me. My real name is Gumnam Singh. Do you know what my name means?”

I know what it means and tell him.

“Unknown. That’s correct. Unknown Singh. No idea what my father was thinking when he named me Gumnam. I must have been an accident. “

“I can’t blame my father either. He constantly worried about bandit attacks, droughts and our crops. We worked very hard in the farm, trying to grow what we could. If the rains didn’t come one year, the pests came to wipe out the crops. If the pests did not come, the bandits came to grab everything. So when I was born, I was just another mouth to feed. He might as well have named me Amangal Singh. Do you know what that means? That’s right Unfortunate.”

What of his parents then?

“Father died when I was ten years old. I have worked in these same fields since then.”

He is surprisingly open about his life. Of course, I have still not broached the topic that I am really here for. The one thing I have learned in my career about talking to people, is to let them talk. Sooner or later, they open up just a little bit more.

“We tried to make a living raising crops. The soil here isn’t that good. Also, there are lot of deer and wild animals that eat the crops. It is always a struggle. I was born in 1990, when people in India preferred socialism. Since then, this country experimented with capitalism, which quickly descended into disastrous dictatorship for a few years. We even went back to having kings and queens for a while.  People remained either very rich, or very poor like us here. All that changed, when Karmic law was implemented. That changed our lives.”

There, that is my opening, the talk about Karmic law. For a man who claimed he was an ignorant farmer, Gumnam is a very good student of history. He had summarized a hundred years of Indian political history in a nutshell.

I ask him about his reputation as Car baba. How did he become Car baba? If I explained it to you, no one would believe me. I need him on record.

He looks at me as though I am out of my mind. “Madam. Now what do I tell you?  I am just a simple farmer, working hard to take care of his family. If people give me names, what can I do about it?”

I point to a poster of his face on the trunk of the fig tree. It reads in bold hindi, “Come one. Come all! Come to get Car Baba’s blessings at Basanthi’s House and be freed of all your worries.”

“Does that look like just another name to you? These people think you are god! I have travelled to many countries Gumnam sir. Never have I seen such devotion”

I needle him.

“People tell me about this magic that you do. Is it real? Where did you learn it? “

“I have no idea why they call me that madam. They think I am one of those people who can make cars fly. I tell you it’s a lie someone is spreading about me.  I don’t know anything about any flying cars. Look at me. I am an old, illiterate, handicapped fellow. What would I know about cars? ”

I begin to think that he is another one of those fake swamis: Another imposter, like those others like him who pull out gold chains from their beards, or claim to heal incurable diseases by sprinkling holy water. I think this Car Baba is a hoax after all.

Then I see it.: a glint in the distance. Not close to the ground, but a few hundred feet above the stacks of hay piled up high behind the two-story brick house. A dark spot that looks too big to be a bird. It’s a metallic black object that hovers above the ground.  The object glinted in the late afternoon sun.

There is no imagining it.

IT IS A FLYING CAR!