But Ghosh was not an average man, and his specialness came from something he had lived with all his life. From his earliest years in Delhi, he never seemed to notice people. Persons, individuals, groups of people, they did not seem to exist for him. They were present, but he did not see them as others did.

Ghosh saw minerals. He saw metals; he even saw numbers. As he grew older, he saw systems, like governments and companies. He saw structures, like business, or the stock market (at which he was a bit of a genius). He saw ideas. But he never managed to see people.

When Ghosh looked at a map—and his job made him look at maps all the time—or at photographs of landscapes, where others would see hills or rivers or trees or villages, he saw the iron ore, bauxite, natural gas, the crude oil underneath. That African country he spent a year in, he read somewhere it was one of the last homes of a nearly extinct wild dog. An interesting fact, but his mind stored it among the unimportant trivia, because he was buying land for iron ore for a Chinese company.

He combined in a rare mind this singular focus with a genius at dealing with systems, in this case, governments. Companies lined up outside his door to get projects pushed through or useless people moved away. To get problems solved.

Which was why he was travelling over the bumpiest roads of western Odisha to Balangir. Through the tinted windows he saw farmers’ houses glide by, thick forests and fields. The big pile of reports he had read were still on the seat by his side, though he didn’t need to read them twice, given his memory. This was a simple problem and hardly required his skills. Africa, now that had been a problem.

It was strange, Ghosh would sometimes think. It was … ironic, that’s what it was. The most valuable resources were usually found under the feet of people who didn’t seem to need them. Even worse, these were usually people who needed the land more than what was inside it. And if that did not complicate matters, sometimes the land meant more to them than just space for farming and living. Sometimes it would be ancestors buried there, other times it would be gods and legends. But, and no less ironic, the best veins of these resources were under tribal lands. Take Chhattisgarh, or Jharkhand, or this place. Invisible people who no one was interested in.

He sometimes wondered what the people of New York or Delhi or Shanghai would do if rich veins of crude oil and iron ore were found under their houses and streets. They wouldn’t just get up and leave, even if the iron ore and bauxite would be needed to build their cars or aircraft, and the crude oil would be needed to run their cars or aircraft.