Where I couldn’t bid goodbye

I still don’t have the courage to buy Teachers’ Day cards.

It was 11^{th of} August 2018. I was sitting in a tea shop and drinking a cup of black tea with a friend. We were waiting for the bus to go to the city. My friend, he does not talk much in the mornings. He is either lost in thoughts or browsing through social media. I was drowsy from the medicines that I took the previous night and was staring blankly at the rows of rubber trees opposite to the tea shop. My phone beeped with a message notification.

“Our KP passed away.”

I read it, closed the app, and turned off the phone. I began staring blankly at the trees again.

“Not KP, no,” I told myself in disbelief. Last time I went to visit KP, he was alright, and it was just two weeks ago that I spoke to him over the phone. I checked the message again, hoping that it was a moment of horrific hallucination. But it was not.

My heart was racing, and I was sweating. I touched my friend’s hand and he looked at me.

“What is the matter, why are you pale?”

“Sir is no more.”

My head was reeling, and I felt that my body was growing heavy. I could not get words out of my mouth. My mind was muffled with thoughts, but nothing was quite clear. I had flashes of him taking classes, holding discussions in his cabin, talking about life and science.

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Porsezian or KP as we fondly called him was my professor at Pondicherry University. I met him first after a class by him on Mathematical Physics. As I entered his cabin to clarify a doubt, he asked me if I wanted the answer or a discussion. A discussion, I said and that was the beginning of an incredible mentorship.

One day, during my second year, he called me and asked what I wanted to do after masters.

“Ph.D. Theoretical nonlinear optics.”

“Good. So you don’t like experiments.”

That evening, he gave me a paper on the nature of nonlinear optics in negative index materials. I did not understand a word, but he asked me to reproduce the results from that paper. For the next ten months, I would sit in his cabin after class hours and discuss the paper. Never have I gotten an answer from him. He would drop clues and make me struggle to come up with an answer. Not just that, for every result out there, he would ask me to design an experiment and I hated that. But it was not long before my aversion for experiments numbed. I grew fond of designing experiments.

On the day I graduated, he told me that a real physicist is someone who appreciates equations and experiments alike. They are just two different ways on our quest to understand nature. Little did I know on the day he gave me the research article that I would end up being a Ph.D. student in experimental nonlinear optics.

That was just one of the several ways by which I was influenced by him. I was in touch with him even after my graduation. He knew my ups and downs.

It was not just Physics that I discussed with him. He talked to me about life and pointed out the biggest fear that I had been holding in me for years. Ever since I was a kid, my sole aim in life was to prove the world that I could achieve, and I am worthy. I had not paid attention to my health or my wishes. I did not trust people. I built a wall around me and guarded it day and night. I was revengeful. But it all changed with him.

I never told him that for the first time, I saw, a father figure in someone. Deep inside all my thoughts about my future and dreams, he was there.

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My friend asked if we should return to the hostel, I was not sure. What would I do there? The Nonlinear Optics textbook that he used to borrow from me was right on the table. I just wanted to cry but I was numb. I called my mom who by then had already got the news. I could not even cry to her. I just felt empty. That’s what the death of someone you look up to feels like. His role in my life came to a sudden stop that I had no way of responding to. I still have not responded to it. I am still numb. I am still recovering. Is there a way to fill this void? I do not know.

 

The good, bad, and ugly of a broken foot

Falling down and breaking my bones is an art that I have been practicing over the years with no dedication but with supreme success. All thanks to the way I walk- sloppy frog jumps, drunken duck walk, mad mouse hops, and so on. Add to it my eyeballs which can shuttle back and forth, up and down at the speed of light. This should tell how the art form comes so naturally to me. Every time I fall down, my poor bones would beg for an extra week of rest but my mind is too ambitious to let them stay in bed. I would give discourses on how my will power wins over physical fatigue and illness, but the truth is staying indoors for more than a day is dead boring.

Something different happened this time confining me to bed for about a month. It was a breezy Friday evening and I was walking down the usual road in my usual way to catch a bus for dinner with a friend. Stepping over a small stone, I twisted my ankle and sensed a sharp pain but it was nothing compared to the torture of my hunger pangs. Note the point, I did not fall down. I hopped into the bus discarding the pain and started dreaming the sumptuous dinner I was about to have. As I delved into the crispy roasted chicken legs, a slight discomfort knocked my foot and then a chicken egg-like structure developed on my foot. This was followed by an unwilling yet necessary visit to a nearby hospital. The doctor confirmed the pain to be from a fractured bone and my mom whom I had called by then confirmed that I am the most reckless kid ever. So there was a constant downpour of advice on one side and plain bashing from the other for the next few hours.

I had to keep my leg straight with constrained movement. The doctor’s advice sounded like the starting line of a Physics problem. My calf bone had to be at an angle of 20 degrees from the bed and my foot perpendicular to the calf bone. I began my sedentary journey at home and for most days, there was incessant rainfall and gloomy weather outside. My worrisome granny kept shooting me with questions as to how exactly I broke my leg. She was not even close to accepting the reason I gave. I guess, it sounded too silly to her. ‘Did you ride a hefty bike and fall down?’, ‘ Did you jump down the stairs in five steps ?’, ‘ Did you pick up a fight with someone ?’ were some of her thousand queries. God, I was furious in no time but that did not stop her. She would pity me for a while and again start the full-fledged inquiry. It still goes on.

One thing that pleased me beyond all expectations during the crummy period was the food. The aroma from the kitchen would dance through the air, tickle my senses and rub out the wobbliness from medicines. What could be better than some piping hot food on a rainy day? There was no denial when it came to food and by then my mom had understood the secret to keep my mouth shut from ranting. I had more ice creams than I had the entire year. The bliss of good food kept my neurons from firing in random directions but the day came.

My mind no longer wanted to agree with my leg. The battle had begun.

Suddenly, I wanted to walk, run, jump and play somersaults all at once. The tension kept building up my toes and my leg was no longer obedient to what was good. Once my mom leaves for office and my granny gets busy cleaning the garden, I would creep out of my bed in silence and spring to the nearby window. Cautiously, I would wander the room always at close vicinity to the bed with one foot always up. Oh, what relief! The blood rushing down the legs felt like little fairies caressing the wounded with feathers-delightful. It was bad, I realized soon. Pain oozed up and down my feet every night I did the secret hopping. Nights were becoming nightmares with extreme pain.

From then on, I had to entertain myself without hopping and started watching action-packed movies religiously. That was the best part that helped me have the most vivid dreams- I did all that I couldn’t do in reality. I was walking up the hills, being chased by animals and shooting down the zombies. The dreams were powerful, exuberant and projected me as a quirky ninja warrior. During one Jurassic park dream, I woke startled thinking a dinosaur had caught my leg but then it was my mom who was patiently adjusting the posture of my foot.

I am marching (slightly crippled) towards the day when I will be able to jump and play gleefully again. As usual, I promise to be more careful from now on but does that even work?