“Hunger is a disease only cured by death”, Alin remembered mentioning in one of his lectures at MIT. His students clapped without enthusiasm, and since then, this was quoted, posted, tweeted, retweeted, trolled and debated countless times. But fundamentally, few understood what he was trying to say. Fewer took him seriously. And despite his academic brilliance, no one believed he could do anything significant in real terms, as most of what he proposed was pretty much theoretical.

Sitting alone in his laboratory, located inside a century-old building on Free School Street, a part of the colonial ‘White Town’ of Calcutta, Alin thought about all that. He looked at the whiteboard, with his newly discovered formula scribbled on it and sighed.

His life, one may say, has also been like a formula till now. A gnawing idea in his head that turned into a raging obsession. A brief romance. A bad marriage. Worse divorce. Like a much predictable movie script life of a crazy scientist. But what he created now is anything but predictable.

He picked up his phone and dialled.

“Were you sleeping?”

Qadar’s voice on the other side sounded heavy and rough, but not without humour, “It’s three in the morning here on a weeknight. What the fuck do you think I would be doing?”

“I couldn’t figure out whom to call. Only remembered about the time difference when the phone started ringing.”
Qadar became serious quickly. He recognised this rare tone in the voice of his closest friend.

“Hey, not a problem bro…are you alright? What happened?”

“I didn’t tell you about stuff that I’ve been working on of late…”

“I know what you’re working on. Three-person babies, genetically altered embryos, designer kids, blah blah blah. Big fucking deal. Zillions of people are working on it. I’m working on parts of it myself. You woke me up for this?”

“None of that. It was only a cover.” Alin took a deep breath.

“I found a cure for hunger.”

Qadar went silent briefly. Then said: “I am taking the first flight out. Should be there by tomorrow. In the meanwhile, just do me a favour and don’t talk to anybody.”

Alin disconnected and sat there quietly. The doorbell rang.

Alin opened the door and saw Qadar, the fatigue of an intercontinental flight written all over him.

His hug smelt of in-flight food and free alcohol.

“…So you see, at the end of it, it does not seem complicated at all, does it? In fact, at this point, I would say it seems rather obvious.” They were sitting in his laboratory.

“This is huge, dude!” Qadar said, trying to suppress his excitement and all other emotions that were sprouting in his mind. “I mean it’s probably the biggest fucking thing to be invented ever! But why do you call it a cure? If I understood it correctly, it’s an induced accelerated genetic mutation.”

Alin’s eyes lit up. “Because hunger is a fucking disease! One that kills millions. Forces countless others to do terrible things. Forces people into slavery, into prostitution, into theft, into murder… there is so much evil spawned by hunger… how could it not be a disease, a sickness?” He started pacing up and down the room cramped with instruments and gadgets. “Imagine a world without hunger and without all the sufferings that it brings with it! Just read my logs, it’s got all the data. I even created a model of how crime will exponentially come dow…” His speech stopped mid-sentence as a glass bottle smashed at the back of his skull and Alin blacked out.

The press conference was noisy. “This is my gift to humanity,” Qadar said, raising his voice over the din. “If you look at this model that I have created, you’ll notice how crime will reduce exponentially over time without hunger. This is my vision of the world as it should be. The world I will leave to our children. And their’s. Today’s presentation is just a general overview. I will publish the scientific details and all data for peer evaluation in the next couple of days. What today resides only in my head and in my notes will be everyone’s to benefit from. During my address at the UN General Assembly this weekend, I will also reveal my rollout plan. If my timeline is followed, we can treat every single human being on the planet by the end of this decade. And hunger will be history.”

As Qadar got in the car, his head was full of sounds and images from the evening. Of the tweets with #HungerIsHistory, which his publicist was clever enough to screen right after his presentation. It has gone wildly viral since then. How someone wondered if there could be a prize greater than the Nobel that could be created just to honour him. How he is already being called a messiah by people from across different faiths and cults. How an attractive young reporter asked him for the number of his hotel room for an exclusive interview. His head was so full of all this that he didn’t notice when the driver took the road away from the city towards the highway.

There is no sign of civilisation for miles from the shack where they brought Qadar. They had also meticulously brought all the instruments, gadgets, computers, notebooks, and every scrap of paper they could find from the laboratory. They asked him if this was all or if there was anything more that had anything to do with ‘The Cure’. There was duct tape over his mouth, and he had to shake his head to say no. Then they set all of it on fire.

One of his captors started explaining in a calm voice. “Allow me to introduce ourselves. We call ourselves ‘The Balancers’. As the name suggests, we work behind the scenes in every country, preventing major disruptions and maintaining the status quo. Disruptions like vaccines for incurable diseases, the invention of unlimited green energy sources or the development of AI superintelligence. We try and stop or slow down radical progress that changes humanity too rapidly for its own good and create a counterbalance.

We don’t have any enmity with you personally, Doctor. We, on the contrary, admire your intention. But you see, we cannot let your work come to life. Simply because it would mean the end of human civilization as we know it. Imagine a world without hunger. Imagine millions of farmers without a livelihood. Along with everyone related to the food industry. Imagine people refusing to work because they don’t have to. Imagine all these people taking to crime because they don’t have anything better to do. Imagine the rapes, the drug abuse, the anarchy. We can’t let this happen. You may promise to never let The Cure out. To never turn it into reality. But there would always be people who would steal its know-how from you. Or torture it out of you. We can’t take that risk. We will have to end it. Here. With you.”
Qadar shook his head vigorously and tried to scream. Tears rolled down his cheeks. It kept rolling down for a while even after the bullet exited the back of his head.

Alin woke up. And like every time he woke since his confinement, he cursed his friend. Mostly for not having the liver to finish him off altogether. Instead, Qadar stuffed him in a cupboard in his basement, covered the wall with cement plaster and painted it over. Leaving him bound, gagged and blindfolded. Never to be found.

Alin also cursed himself for trying his formula on himself during his experiments.

The only person in the history of mankind to be cured of hunger waited for old age to cure him of his misery.