“Hah, originally, yes. My father was from Nellore, and we spent holidays there, though I was raised first in Hyderabad and then New Delhi. I did graduate studies at McGill, though, and lived in Ottawa for some years.”
I imagine he might have liked to know my caste, to add that stamp to my resumé. But such questions are no longer the done thing among the educated classes.
“And you live in Delhi now?”
“That’s right,” I said. There was a slight brightness to his eyes that conveyed genuine, relatively untainted interest. He struck me as a man concerned with bonds of affection and community. He might like you; he might even, somehow, someday, help you.
“And you would like to hear about our involvement with Venkat?”
“If that is what you want to talk about. Also your own experience of the disaster.”
He sat with elbows on the armrests, hands in his lap. I waited for him to ask more about the focus of the study, as others of my interviewees had. Why are you doing this? Or, as Suresh had: Why dredge this up?
“And your experience?” he asked instead.
“I, mine?”
He cleared his throat. “Did you not lose loved ones in the disaster?”
To this point, none of my other subjects had asked me this, and I can tell you now that none but Seth ever did. They were caught up their own grief and their own stories; they must have figured they would have known my name if my wife or children had died.
Since this was not a therapeutic relationship, and since I had withheld that information for no reason I could name, it seemed wrong to deflect. “My sister and her children.”
I watched Seth’s face. Not much changed, except for a shift of those eyebrows. And yet I distinctly felt that my pain was filtering through him, and that he had no sense of how vulnerable this made him.
I elaborated, my mouth dry. “My brother-in-law, who still lives in Montreal, was my first interviewee. His wife, my sister, Kritika, and my nephew and niece were coming to India for their summer holidays.”
His eyes looked steadily into mine. “Your parents are still alive?”
“No, not anymore.”
He hadn’t moved, nor had I, and yet it was as though some column connecting our chests was collapsing, drawing us toward an unseen centre.
“And your own family, is anyone travelling with you?”
“I don’t have a family. I . . .” This, too, is always an awkward thing to say, particularly to men of my own age and station in life. “I chose to remain unmarried.” I broke his gaze. Too much. I was short of breath. Looking around the office, I saw a PhD from Indiana State University, framed on the wall, together with several teaching awards. Jumbled into the shelves, physics toys: a drinking bird, a Newton’s cradle, wooden blocks in a Roman arch.
Seth looked out his window. “The sun is out! Perhaps let’s go sit in the, what do you call it, gazebo sort of thing, in the garden. There are comfortable chairs that stay dry.”
“That rainstorm was quite something.” I don’t make small talk. It really was quite something.
He swept some untidy stacks of papers into a briefcase and closed his door behind us. “It’s the lake. Pulls the freak rainstorms in.”
“You are a professor of physics?” I asked as we descended.
“Everyone has to profess something. I profess physics and God.” Sly and harmless delight.
“Ah?” I said. The G-word raised my arm hairs a little.
“Associate Professor only,” he said.
He was approaching retirement, not as a full professor but one rank below. Some halt in his career? “What is your specialty?”
“I don’t specialize, as such. I like to think my specialty is making people love this subject.” He cleared his throat. “Let me put it to you this way. Every scientist sees the world through his discipline’s teachings. When people learn about physics, the world expands for them. The Big Bang, I like to call it: if a man continues to learn, his universe will be constantly expanding, isn’t it? So I teach Introductory Physics, Physics of Chemistry, Physics of Biology, Physics for Non-Majors. Courses that might typically rotate among faculty, but I like to teach them. I have never gone in much for research.”
“And yet . . . teaching here?” We found seats in the garden, very nice, an outdoor student lounge. “Harbord is a research institution, isn’t it?”
He cleared his throat again. “When I first came to Harbord, the physics department was not the best in the country. If it was, they wouldn’t have hired me! Maybe they didn’t know that, then. Not much resources. Very little equipment, not too many graduate students. My area of research was elementary particles. I worked on muons, for my dissertation. You know much about . . .?”
I’m sure I looked quite blank.
“Doesn’t matter. Anyway, I got married in the summer between completing my PhD and coming to Lohikarma. After I arrived, and got settled, I started to see how competitive it could be to get research funding. Such a big part of your time, competing for grants and prizes and publications. Competing, competition . . . it’s not really my thing.”
Seth used his hands when he talked—we all do that, Indians—but in concert with his eyebrows, as though one pair were conducting the other.
“My wife, Lakshmi, arrived about six months later, in the middle of a Canadian winter, poor girl. I had to get her settled. I was the junior man on the totem pole that year, so I taught all the introductory classes. And I very much enjoyed it. Especially the classes for non-majors. I enjoy the feeling of bringing them into the field. Initially, students are fearful. They think they will be bored; they think they might feel unintelligent. But they come to love physics! It’s truly satisfying, truly so.
“So. There was no real opportunity for me to continue my research that first year, and without my dissertation director, I felt a bit lost. I had enjoyed my research, but I didn’t kid myself into thinking I was the most brilliant physicist that ever walked the earth. Have you read any Richard Feynman? Now there’s a brilliant fellow. A very dedicated teacher, also. He used to say that if we can’t explain it to an undergraduate, we don’t know enough about it. I try to keep up. I read the journals, try to incorporate the new research into my courses. Keeps it interesting. You know? So many people out there are driven to do research, to write. I ride on their backs!”
I smiled, still waiting for an answer to my question.
“But, back then, my old mentor was writing a book, using the research I had conducted under his supervision. I read the book as he was writing, offered some suggestions. He invited me back to Indiana one summer, to work with him. And when the book was published, he gave me co-author credit. This was some four years after I was hired here. I had published two other papers in the meantime, also co-authored with him. Anyway, it was unusual, for a young physicist to have co-authorship on a book. I had good teaching reports. My colleagues liked me. I got tenure.
“My children came along, and I kept on teaching—but research?” He shook his head. “Not for me. I never tried to advance beyond Associate level.”
I would learn, in time, what a popular teacher he was, both among undergraduates and with his students in an adult education course, which he taught almost entirely using examples in nature and real-world experiments, rather than in a lab. He was beloved as a teacher, even while remaining a figure of some ridicule among his more ambitious colleagues. I was struck, then and later, by Seth’s having shaped his seeming lack of ambition into a professional niche, justifying his tenure by being both popular and indispensable: teaching courses that higher-reaching professors might feel were beneath them while also providing them with a gratifying sense of superiority.
“I