Anniversaries are for looking forward just as much as they are for looking back. As we celebrate our fiftieth anniversary as the state humanities council, we asked SJ Sindu to imagine what Virginia might be like fifty years from now.
Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author who teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. What follows is a brief glimpse of that imagined future and a glimpse of two new characters that are featured in forthcoming work by Sindu.
By SJ Sindu
Teja still had to buy wine. There was time. The party wouldn’t start until seven, and the bullet train back to Philadelphia could whisk her home in under an hour. It was only noon in Richmond, the late summer sun strong enough to burn Teja’s newly buzzed head as she picked her way among boulders on the bank of the James River.
Some good-bye party, if she had to buy her own wine. But she’d left Serai cleaning the house, and Serai had promised to do everything else, including baking the cake—vegan of course. The majority of the world had stopped eating animal products when Teja was a child.
Soon Teja would stop marking time by the sun, or even the seasons. Soon she’d be on her way, aboard NASA’s Poseidon 3 spacecraft, first to Mars for refueling, then farther than any human had yet gone.
“How’d New Houston treat you?”
Soon Teja would stop marking time by the sun, or even the seasons.
The question preceded the asker. Teja knew the voice, never mind that it had been almost a year since she heard it last, never mind the new tremor, the deeper gravel at the throat.
She spotted the asker at last. Her elderly mentor, striding slowly along the tree-flanked path on the deep bank, walking stick in one hand and a pawpaw in the other.
“I didn’t get much time to see New Houston,” Teja said. “Just the training center.”
Dr. Kala held out the pawpaw and placed it gently in Teja’s outstretched hand. The yellow skin of the fruit bruised with black marks. Ripe and smelling of that peculiar combination of mango and melon.
“When I was your age,” Dr. Kala said, “pawpaws ripened in August.”
Teja helped Dr. Kala onto a rock along the dirt path. In the middle of a Friday in October, no one else was out here. The sky shone an unblemished cerulean, shimmering here and there with reflections from the solar net like a child’s drawing full of glitter.
Dr. Kala squinted up, one hand shading her wrinkled face. She was over 100 now, nearly a third of her skeleton replaced with ceramic or titanium, almost all of her organs and nerves artificially regenerated.
“My father watched the moon landing as a kid,” Dr. Kala said. “I wish he’d been alive to see us on Mars. And now you’re headed even deeper into space.” She shook her head, her thinning white hair shining. “We humans have a need to know the unknowable.”
She’d said something similar, that very first day of Teja’s first year of college, twenty years before. A giant lecture hall full of sunlight, and Dr. Kala had bounded in and announced that each one of the bright-eyed young adults was meant to be an explorer. Of course, nearly no one in Introduction to Physics had succeeded in Dr. Kala’s assignment for their lives. Most had settled down in Virginia towns after graduation. It helped that Virginia was sheltered from the worst of climate change. The entire west coast scarred by wildfires. The American South besieged by hurricanes. Miami, New Orleans, and most of Old Houston all under water. Over the last fifty years, the size of Virginia’s population had swelled with climate refugees, Richmond burgeoning into a sprawling city of three million.
“I don’t think all of us are meant to be explorers,” Teja said. She was thinking of Serai, of her own parents, hunkered down in the suburbs, perfectly happy with tending a garden and watching their birdfeeders. It was a peaceful life, though one that had always made Teja feel like she couldn’t breathe.
They walked out onto the river, climbing from rock to rock. Dr. Kala leaned heavily on Teja and her walking stick. Muddy water dotted with broken branches from the last storm. Bright green river grass tufting into islands. The geese and ducks and cormorants diving into the water. An anhinga spreading its wings to dry in the sun, a black dot among the rest.
“What was the river like when you were young?” Teja asked as she helped Dr. Kala cross from boulder to boulder, heading deeper into the river. The sound of falling water filled the air.
“It’s even more beautiful than I remember.”
They could see the fake waterfall created by the energy plant, made higher and deeper a few decades ago to be able to power the growing city.
A blue heron, barely fledged, landed on the rock next to them.
“Hello, little one.” Dr. Kala turned to Teja. “Richmond made the right decision in declaring this conservation land.”
They watched the heron walk along the edge of the rock, peering into holes full of water, searching for food.
“There’s still so much do to on Earth.” Teja felt a flutter of something deep in her belly. Nerves, or maybe it was fear. “It feels almost silly to be going to space, when I could be helping here.”
The heron poked his long beak into an eddy, but failed to catch a fish. He walked on.
Dr. Kala leaned on her walking stick, watching the bird. “It’s natural to be afraid. Anyone would be.”
Teja had been dreaming of the black expanse of space. Blank and endless immersion. No breezes like the one that now ruffled her hair. No squawking of gulls. Silence as absolute as death. Her heart folded into a tight ball.
“But you ask a good question, Teja. The Earth needs its fixers. When I was young, we weren’t sure if we’d make it out of the mess we’d made for ourselves. A world-wide pandemic, climate crisis, hate crimes, our rights disappearing. But I’ll tell you something. It wasn’t just the scientists and politicians who saved us. It was also the teachers, the artists, the parents, the activists, the journalists.”
Teja opened her mouth to say that this was exactly what she was talking about, but Dr. Kala continued.
“All of those visionaries were explorers of a sort.” Dr. Kala nodded. “Not just the ones who dreamed of colonies on the moon and Mars. And those deep space explorers are saving us in other ways.”
“How? Aren’t they just running away?”
Teja remembered how when her aunt had moved to the Phobos Space Station in orbit around Mars, her parents had mourned as if she had died. She would see this aunt in a few months. She’d promised to come to Mars to see Teja off after Poseidon 3’s refueling stop.
“The spirit of exploration gives us hope,” Dr. Kala said. “It helps us see the impossible made possible. If you can go to Europa and drill down beneath the ice to the ocean below, then we here on Earth—we can do anything.”
Teja took a deep breath and let it out. She’d miss these smells, the water and the pawpaw she still held in her hand.
The heron stopped walking, held itself frozen.
Teja reached out for Dr. Kala’s wrinkled hand, this woman who had been more of a parent to her than her own mother. The trip to Europa would take two years, then three years in orbit, two years back. Dr. Kala might not see her return.
The heron plunged its beak into the water, fast as an arrow, and returned with a small fish held tight.
Dr. Kala squeezed her hand as they watched the heron gulp down its meal, spread its wings, and take off.
This piece was commissioned for and first published in our 2025 edition of Views.
- Learn more about SJ Sindu
- Learn more about Kristy Heilenday
