There is a village in north Gujarat called Modhera where, for the last several years, no household has paid an electricity bill.
The village runs entirely on solar power — panels on rooftops, a battery storage system shared across the community, enough capacity to keep the lights on through the night. India’s government calls it the country’s first twenty-four-hour solar-powered village, which is a bureaucratic way of saying something more interesting: that a cluster of a few hundred homes in rural Gujarat has, in the twenty-first century, caught up with a temple that was built there in 1026 AD.
The Sun Temple at Modhera was constructed by the Solanki dynasty with a precision that still unsettles me when I think about it. Twice a year — at the spring and autumn equinoxes — the rising sun aligns perfectly with the sanctum at the centre of the temple, flooding the inner chamber with light at exactly the moment of sunrise. The architects who designed this had no satellite imagery, no computer modelling, no surveying tools beyond what the naked eye and accumulated knowledge of the sky could offer. And they got it right. They got it so precisely right that a thousand years later, the alignment still holds.
I stood in the Surya Kund — the enormous geometric stepwell in front of the temple — on a January morning and tried to do the arithmetic of what I was looking at. One thousand years of sun rising and setting over this stone. One thousand years of monsoons and droughts and invasions and the slow, indifferent accumulation of centuries. And the temple still stands, and the light still falls where it was designed to fall, and the village around it has now organised itself around the same principle the builders began with: that the sun is reliable, that it will come back, that you can build your life around that fact.
What the builders knew, and what the village has quietly remembered, is not written in any text I know of. It was not preserved in a museum or protected behind a glass case. It just persisted — passed through hands and seasons and generations until someone looked up at the sky and thought: this is still true.
On the drive from Ahmedabad to Dwarka two days later, we passed something I had not expected to feel anything about: the Reliance Industries refinery complex near Jamnagar. It is visible from the road as a vast industrial city — pipelines, towers, processing units stretching across the flat Saurashtra landscape for what seems like kilometres. I had worked with Reliance earlier in my career, and seeing it from the road felt briefly strange — the way it feels to encounter the scale of something you were once briefly part of from the outside. A reminder that the things we build, including the systems we participate in, have dimensions we rarely see from where we are standing.
We were on our way to Dwarka, which is perhaps the oldest continuously inhabited city in India, depending on who you ask and which excavation you believe. We took a ferry from Okha to Bet Dwarka — an island temple a short distance offshore, reached in an hour by boat. Or it was reached by boat when we went. A bridge has since been built.
I have been thinking about that ferry since I came home. The crossing itself was unremarkable — fishing boats, sun on the water, a Gujarati family sharing the bench beside us, a small child pointing at something in the distance. But the knowledge that the bridge now exists — that the hour on the water is no longer necessary, that the particular rhythm of that crossing belongs already to the past — gave the memory a weight it might not otherwise carry. Not loss exactly. Something quieter. The recognition that the way things are is always already the way things were.
The lions were the last thing I expected.
We spent a morning at the Devalia Safari Park within the Gir National Park, which is a fenced enclosure where sightings are guaranteed rather than hoped for — the kind of compromise between conservation and tourism that I approached with mild scepticism and left thinking about for days. A lion family emerged from the scrub: a female, a male resting in the shade, cubs at play nearby. We watched them from the jeep in near silence, which is the correct response.
What I did not expect was how ordinary they looked doing extraordinary things. A cub batting at a sibling. A male yawning. The female moving through the grass with the absolute economy of attention that predators carry — nothing wasted, nothing performed. These are the last Asiatic lions alive in the wild anywhere on earth. A population that was down to fewer than twenty animals at the turn of the twentieth century. A species that exists today — that was sitting in front of me in January 2023 — because of a combination of conservation decisions, community involvement, and something that is harder to quantify: the simple fact that the lions themselves kept going.
There is no monument to this. No inscription on a wall, no Sound and Light Show, no narrated history in a famous voice. The lions did not rebuild after being nearly destroyed. They did not leave anything behind that a later civilisation could excavate and restore to its former glory. They simply persisted, generation after generation, in a shrinking patch of forest in Gujarat, surviving because survival was the only option available to them.
Which is, I have come to think, the most honest form of endurance there is.
There were four of us on this trip. My wife and I, our young child, and my mother. Three generations in a car, which is its own kind of continuity — the oldest and the youngest seeing the same things from seats that are only a few feet apart, making of them whatever their particular moment of life allows them to make.
My mother has seen Gujarat change across decades I only know about from her stories. My child will grow up having been carried through these temples and forests before they could form a complete sentence about what they saw. What they will carry from this — what any of us carry — is not the facts or the photographs or even the clear memories. It is something more like a residue. A sense, somewhere below articulation, that the world has been going on for a very long time and intends to continue.
The sun rose this morning over Modhera the same way it has risen every morning for a thousand years. The lions are still there. The bridge stands where the ferry used to run.
These things do not require our witness to continue. They are not preserved by being remembered. They simply go on, which is the only kind of permanence that actually lasts.