I was sitting at my desk, awaiting the interminable hour to end. Dr. Fabec rambled on about conformal mapping and Riemann surfaces. Believe it or not, I had once been interested in mathematics. But this was my junior year – the year where many students, myself included, have become rather weary of the game of higher education, of exams, and professors, and just wish to be done with all of it. Ray Fabec and his ilk could take virtually any subject, no matter how rich, and drain the life out of it like a cleaning lady wringing water out of a sponge.
At last! The old prune was done preaching and I could finally go back to my dorm. Luckily, I had a private room. I don't know how I would have survived if I had the need to room with another person. By nature I was private and shy, and did not always do well around others. Having my own space made me feel a degree of comfort. Like a little cave I could call my own, that sheilded me from the outside world.
But I am getting ahead of myself. My name is Deep. Deep Sengupta, mathematics major, NRI, computer nerd, and all around loser. Ok, I'll admit, not a loser in the traditional sense . . . I wasn't on drugs, hadn't gotten any ladies pregnant, didn't date white women, didn't eat meat and was as smart as a whip, but like many Indians in America, I felt out of place. Indian. Ha! Is that even the truth? I was born here in Louisiana. My parents were the Indians. I was as American as they came, but still had brown skin and a Hindu name. It's an odd feeling, never feeling at home anywhere. I had been to India maybe four times in my entire life. In theory, I was interested in India and Hinduism, but any time they got too close . . . any time they stopped being a “concept” and became a reality . . . well, that was where we parted. Real people and real places are just too imperfect and contradictory. They always confused me. Maybe this is why I chose the absolute certainty and sterile world of mathematics to thrive in. Sterile, did I say? Please don't misunderstand me. There are delights in the worlds of pure abstraction, delights such as only the artist might know of, for mathematics is an art, much more than a science. The sterility is that of the absolutely pure, not the antiseptic. There is beauty in these austere theorems, these hyperborean regions where (relatively) few can climb. I have always made a point of not being proud. I try to be humble. But when it comes to mathematics, I must confess I feel at least a measure of conceit. I won't stoop to bigotry on account of my caste, or my religion, nor my debating skills -- in fact, I regard those who do with no small measure of contempt. But I must admit that I feel a sense of smug assurance when an otherwise intelligent and well-rounded person admits to me that they just “cannot do math.” I do not hold it against them, nor do I let it give me a bloated head, for there are many far, far better than me in this field. But still, it gives me a sense of slight hubris to know that I can do some things which seem impossible to other people.
Arre! Aap kaise hai, Deepaji?”
Ooooooh, I just hated it when Horace did that! He would often meet me as I was getting back to my dorm and greet me in Hindi. At least he knew that my “native” language was called “HindI” and not “HindU”! But still, I detested the word “ji” and since he was learning from books meant for British readers, he always pronounced everything wrong. I must say it also annoyed me that a white boy knew more Hindi than I did. Still, he was the one fellow on my floor that I spoke to on a regular basis.
And my name was Deep, not Deepa.
“Hey, man, what's happening?”
“Not a whole lot. Just glad my English exam is over! Was pretty tough."
“Ah, you liberal arts fags have it so easy! Try coming to one of my classes if you want to see what tough is!”
Most of us math-sci guys could be pretty arrogant about our classes. That there was more of life in Literature and Philosophy, I will readily admit . . . but I mean . . . what were they going to do with their lives? I found it pointless to learn something merely so that you could teach it to others. And what was a degree in philosophy or English good for? I guess when you are a geek type you take whatever sort of arrogance is allowed to you. At any rate, we often berided, albeit gently, our liberal-arts-minded bretheren, at the ease of the classes that they had to deal with. We called their classes “fake classes” which we took as diversions, to bring up our GPA or as entertainment. My dad was a doctor, I was going to be an engineer, anything else would have gotten me disowned by my family.
“Hey, Deepa what you doing tonight? I am having a few friends over at my apartment for beer and movies. Some ***** are going to be there too. Wanna come?”
I said, “No, thanks, I have some research on the Net to do, and have to gear up for a condensed matter mid-term”. Keep in mind this was in 1994, when the “net” meant surfing gopher sites using Lynx and FTP sites using Archie. It was for hardcore nerds, not your bored adolescents of today. And I had always kept away from physics courses, but Horace didn't need to know that. All you have to do is give someone a technical-sounding explanation and whether it made sense or not, I found it shuts most people up real quick! I had only a vague idea of what condensed-matter was. The truth was I just did not feel at ease with other people, especially large groups of others whom I did not know. At a party, I would tend to float around by the punch bowl and look geeky. Not exactly a good way to pick up ladies. Besides, although I knew that at my age I was being naive, I still hated to be around guys who thought of all ladies as *****.
“Ok, yaar, your loss!”.
Yaar. I wasn't even sure what that meant. Anyway, I walked into my dorm room and poured myself a glass of whiskey. Although not allowed by our dormitory, there was a “silent rule” that if no one ratted on you, you wouldn't rat on anyone else. That made for a more peaceful atmosphere than what you see at the ladies' dorms, where you often see people on the same floor who can't stand each other. Men pretend to be civil in each other's company even if they are not. Hell, they could be on opposite sides in a war and then come home to the same dorm after a day at the front. Women seem to be under no such taboo -- when they hate each other, they do so with no thought to good taste or propriety. The alcohol had begin to work on me to reduce the tensions of the day and I began to study:
“The mapping defined by an analytic function f(z) is conformal, except at critical points, that is, points at which the derivative f'(z) is zero”.
Just an extension of one-dimensional calculus, really. One has to admire Cauchy and his contemporaries for such elegance. When you think of it now, it seems inevitable, natural. But this was over one hundred years ago. Such Brilliance! Such insight! Such great minds, great men, only rarely recognized as such. We think of such things as simple now, but when originally thought of, these simple ideas were earth-shattering, much like Newton's ideas. This was not really complicated or boring at all. In fact, Complex Function theory to me seems one of the richer avenues of learning in higher mathematics. How could a university such as this allow people like Fabec to bastardize the subject until it was not only not interesting, but a veritable bore??? The process of mathematics and science is that of art and mysticism. Not logic. The END result is logic, in a perfectly ordered system. But the process of getting there is like painting a picture or writing a symphony. You try and try but cannot force it. Then when you least expect it, in the shower or a barbecue, you feel the Archimedian "EUREKA!" and must obey! A force you feel that is beyond you commands you, forces you and voila! A new idea is born. If miracles exist, they exist in mathematics as well. And even, in a small way, in the minds of mathematics students.
I finished my math studying and ate some crab salad from my little dorm fridge. Did I say that I didn't eat meat? Sorry, I meant only in public. I was a master of hypocisies, like most Indians, and like most people in general. Nonetheless, I specialized in Indian hypocisy. I still had an essay to write on the “Russian Bicameral Mind” for my "fake" Russian culture class, which I quickly finished. Being an Indian, American or not, I knew intimately the details of having “two minds”. I opened my cassette player and slipped in a Rolling Stones tape I had. In dormitory rooms, music is essential so that you can concentrate. The walls are so thin that unless you have a means of drowning sound out from the other rooms, you are constantly being distracted. I heard the lyrics:
Ain’t I rough enough, ooh baby Ain’t I tough enough Ain’t I rich enough, in love enough Ooh! ooh! please
I’ll never see your pizza burnin' I’ll never see your pizza burnin'
I'll never see your pizza burning??? That couldn't be right. I glanced at the cassette . . . Beast of Burden. God, Mick, speak English, won't you! And my mates criticize me for mixing up v's and w's!
All of a sudden my stomach just below my left rib began hurting like hell. As a semi-hypochondriac, I wondered if it was caused from the whisky. I had lifted weights for like 20 minutes the day before, which I also considered as a possiblity, but given two options, I always opt for the more pessimistic interpretation. This didn't stop me from having another drink. And another. And another. I am not a drunk. I do not like being “zonked”. But sometimes in college life, people can forget how much incredible pressure there is on you to perform and conform. It can scarcely be understood by even those who have finished it, let alone those who have never experienced it. The pain in my stomach subsided. The whisky was cheap, but affordable and effective. I dozed off into an alcohol-sedated sleep, dreaming of nothing.
The phone rang, twittering me awake. I had always hated these “new” phones that twittled like birds instead of ringing like proper phones. Or “phins” as Inspector Cleuseau would say. I had no idea of the time so I glanced sleepily at my digital clock and saw that it was almost 2.00 AM, and drearily answered the call, only to hear my mother's sobbing voice at the other end. She was crying and said, “Rajiv's been shot”.
Rajiv. My younger, dyslexic brother. Although we didn't know much about dyslexia then. We merely thought he was “slow”. He had got a job working at a convenience store . . . one that sold beer, cigarettes, condoms, soft drinks, gasoline, candy, and other supermarket sundries at higher prices since they stayed open all night long. One had to pay for “convenience”. Mama hung up. Her name was Sitalakshmi . . . one could scarcely hope for more auspicious name.
I was no longer drunk, nor sleepy. I had heard of other forms of consciousness, but only on rare occasions experienced them. But now I was there . . . I was in a state that I had never been in before. I had been in crisis situations before. I was not a child. Buit I felt a sense of unreality take over me. Despite being the elder, I was not prepared to accept the mortality of my 20-year old brother. Hell, I was only 21 myself! Can someone so young conceive of the meaning of mortality even if he has seen others die? I had seen people killed before. I had been to many funerals. But Rajiv? I had not considered it!
Even after the call, I did not entertain the thought of death. Rajiv was too strong. Much stronger than me. I was an effete scholar, Rajiv a lusty doer! You could sooner damage a pyramid than damage Rajiv! I had just awoken. I was confused. Baffled. But I had seen too many television shows. I felt “a gunshot is not fatal!” How many times had Tom Selleck been shot in "Magnum P.I."? He acted as though it were a mere dog bite!
The phone rang again. I said, “Hello?” Mother answered. She said the words I have never forgotten all these many years: “Rajiv is dead”. Just that and nothing more. "Quoth the Raven", I thought. Possessed of my usual eloquence, all, I could say , was “Oh, man!”. Mum hung up. So did I. I think mum had told me that she had sent my dad to get me. The university was like 25 miles from where we lived in Port Allen. Not far, but enough for me to have created a separate universe for myself to live in.
I heard a knock at my dorm door. I did not want to answer. I did though. When I opened the cedar door, there stood my father. He was stolid as I expected for a moment. He said: "Well, they murdered him”, then, he broke down and I saw a look of anguish and bitterness and pain and regret that I could never have descrbed on a human face. There was no look of surprise, though as though my old man had expected something like this would happen to him as surely as he was born.
I grabbed my fat poppa and hugged him for the first time since I was little. I had never seen him cry before. I had never known him to howl in aguish. Never had I known him to be so fragile, and for my world to be so . . . impermanent, malleable, and dangerous. MY BROTHER WAS DEAD!!!!! Nothing would ever be the same again. Despite all of my “adult” experiences, this is the one that seperated my innocent foolish adolescence from my adulthood. I felt like killing someone. I slammed my door shut like a madman.
Even now, some ten years later, it stands out in my mind. It stands out and refuses to be silenced or muted, not by culture or nature, or predisposition. And no nepenthe can soften the blow felt as keenly as the one felt by Gautama so many years ago, when he realized that he was mortal after all.
2007-03-02 22:52:32
·
answer #1
·
answered by Runa 7
·
0⤊
0⤋