“Look! The sparks” Shashank rapidly ran his exposed palm over the pillow’s surface. There was a power outage; in the dark, with great merriment, he demonstrated to his sister, the principle of static electricity. Upon excitation, the pillow gained positive energy by losing electrons and the brother who excited them accumulated significant amount of negative charge, which he would later discharge. He gathered all the family members and urged his sister, Avanti to feel for his hand in the dark; seconds later, the sister, dumbfounded, stood after being chosen the object for discharging a ‘static shock’. This clever little game played by the siblings amused their parents, and at times of power outage, hitherto glued to either homework or TV, all the members of the family were now brought together. Shashank was about twelve and Avanti about eight years old at the time.
Years later, at the sister’s wedding, parents entreated their children to perform the game that they so affectionately did in their childhood. Shashank rapped his fur coat in the humid air, hurriedly ran his palm over a pillow, sat himself in a plastic chair and begged to be beaten on his back with a towel – nothing worked. Shashank was flabbergasted; he went about pretending with a preoccupied demeanour for the rest of the day. Post wedding, he shut himself in his underground cellar. A professional scientist working for Defence Research, Hyderabad, his work on the electric discharge that swathed a certain star – G2110 fetched him international acclaim. Shashank was in his late twenties, with cropped hair and thick eyebrows; anyone would have noticed the air of scientist about him. His work at the office of Defence Research necessitated that he stays unconditionally secretive about the progress of his experiments; naturally, he was not allowed to bring his work home.
Shashank spent his teenage years in the laboratory of his college, and the whole of his twenties in the dimly lit parlours of his lab in the office. At home, in his cellar, smitten with scientific obsession, he sat behind a monocle shaped cathode ray tube; spent hours glued to the spikes on the screen. Sunlight filtered through the dashed oblong window sashes; rain water pitted the ground around his lab; autumn leaves occasionally littered the floor; winter stitched his person into a fur coat; summer seethed a vision of furnace, his cellar, a parlour with little ventilation. His grovelling maddening celebration of science sickened his thirsty dog that gagged with a bone in its throat and perished into oblivion. With scrapes of metal, he assembled an electron discharger which kept him occupied throughout the early twenties before he moved onto cosmology.
Presently, the incident of his inability to produce ‘static shock’ at sister’s wedding bothered him so much that he requested for a transfer to the department of fundamental physics. His peers snubbed him for the move; it was no road for a budding scientist to trot. The new office was left unoccupied for the last thirty years; contemporary science had moved on, research on quantum physics was at its apotheosis, everyone believed that a breakthrough in the field was nothing short of Nobel. A row of interactive scientific instruments clogged with mud and grease welcomed Shashank - pendulum that creaked and oscillated awkwardly; spring gauge with its wound coil corroded and dented; angular momentum piece with broken feet and torn dashboard, it was lodged indecorously between a gigantic metal bob and a lithe string instrument; wide gaping holes on friction pads. Shashank, as if a pet dog wags his tail approaching the master, reached out for the discoloured incline with much eagerness. The inclined plate rattled under the weight of the rolling steel bob; the collectible itself, at the bottom, had been moved away from the feet of the incline, and an innocent scientist found his feet swelled in winter chill next morning.
A pattern emerged before him, Shashank remained sceptical about it for a while; eventually, he daubed his much spirited mind with the nascent aroma of a breakthrough. The ‘Big Chill’ as the greatest theorists of the twentieth century opined, he found, was gathering around the planet as a sand storm before the onset of a hurricane. The four fundamental forces, theoretical physicists contended, would whimper weakly owing to the expanding universe; one physicist observed “an expanding universe will exhaust even the strongest of the forces such as the ones inside the nucleus….leaving a pale, listless, chill”. But the ‘Big Chill’ was theoretically impossible to overwhelm the inhabitants of planet earth until after a million years. So the confounding findings disconcerted Shashank, for it either meant that the ‘Big Chill’ was impending on us (uprooting all the scientific findings of the last century) or that he merely was wrong (this dismayed him).
The new department’s loneliness would have overwhelmed a lesser scientist, but not Shashank. Here, the Defence Research was tolerant and allowed him to take his work home. With this, he descended into a cloud of solitude with no social contact; inside the confined cellars of his home and office, he improvised for six months before releasing the findings. The newspapers read “Big Chill on us”; Shashank asserted that the fabric of space was unfolding like a tightly wrapped polythene foil did. He noted that the local sections of the foil were creased with millions of years of time folds. These folds although sluggish owing to the entropy build-up of eons of time, did eventually unfold. The worrisome part, he concluded, was that, when it did unfold, entropy that glued the crease together, gave away with a snap. This snap, caused ripples of expansion of the fabric of space at terrifying speeds.
His analysis fetched him decent acclaim from close quarters. But as the days passed, and after several tiring monologues and TV interviews, he was subjected to a series of raunchy parodies. Media bludgeoned him with a charade of uncouth titbits; a series called the ‘Big Silly’ was aired by BBC every Sunday morning for kids where his character was portrayed as a menace to the society. The population over the period of next four months following the announcement switched grounds between that of wonderment, acute anxiety, sordid Indifference and finally settled on cold unpleasantness.
“He had the nerve to oust Einstein’s general theory of relativity” curling his fingers into a fistful, bethought a Nobel Laureate. Shashank’s sister, Avanti, who was presently a writer of science fiction came to his rescue. Her husband was in the army; together they fuelled a concerted movement of writers and defence academies in praise for a scientist who devotedly worshipped science. Shashank, who had abandoned hope, resigned from the Defence Research and locked himself at home. The concerted movement resulted in pacifying edicts by religious communities to assassinate him; it also provoked certain sections of the scientific community to stand up for themselves.
Following summer, a space shuttle was landed on Mars by Chandrayan 18 from Sriharikota. Upon landing, the astronauts died a sudden and mysterious death. The readings from the space shuttle were shared with all the scientists back home; none could make out the reason. A convincing answer from couple of quarters rose up the surface of criticism; buoyantly they stayed there for a while, until someone pelted debris of critical analysis, drowning them back to the bed of criticism. Upon Avanti’s persistent pleading, Shashank agreed to look at the recordings. Avanti’s husband retrieved the records for Shashank, shy of ridicule, he worked in his underground cellar; he discarded even the most infallible of explanations until one fine morning, a letter arrived at his doorstep. It was from a British Journalist who wished to write a book on him; for his book, he earnestly requested Shashank to share his findings on star G2110, the inception of his scientific career. Leafing through the past records on the star, Shashank came across something interesting; the discharge of mysterious electric currents, he figured were the result of expansion of the fabric of space indeed.
Fuelled by the finding, with child-like enthusiasm, he rang up Avanti. “The antistatic wrist straps worn by the astronauts aboard Chandrayan 18 were designed to prevent negative energy. The atmosphere on Mars, Moon and other heavenly bodies is dehydrated and causes negative accumulation…if an astronaut feels for the door knob of the shuttle on his return, the wrist straps made sure that a ‘static shock’ never occurred….remember our childhood game” he explained, violently waving his hands about him, to Avanti who was perched in his sofa strewn with clothes and books that smelt like ammonia. “But, you see, the heavenly bodies are filled with positive energy, for the electrons are escaping from atoms leaving behind positively charged bodies. This is happening as I concluded in my finding: the local observable universe is undergoing a snap of expansion”. Avanti was sceptical, she observed the mental depression her brother was subjected to; she proceeded with caution to avoid further traumatic situations. “And therefore the astronauts died. But this still doesn’t explain why the emission is occurring in the first place” she confronted.
Later that week, the brother and sister summoned their parents and after consultation with close friends and scientists who promised to back him up, Shashank released his findings for a second time. The findings sounded outrageous to many, but the host was stronger and the virus of criticism could do no further damage. He went so far as to attend public interviews. And the fateful day arrived. He was murdered; someone had gained access to his underground cellar. Shashank was killed with his skull smashed open by the rolling metal bobs with which he demonstrated angular momentum to his sister, who was troubled with the concept in her tenth standard. “Cold blooded murder on science, not scientist” read one newspaper. Gloom settled on the family; now it was Avanti’s turn to descend the stairs of mental depression; she found herself culpable for her brother’s death.
The world flapped its shabby fur coat of cynicism as a wet dog would, and raised its ears to Shashank’s findings. Eventually, the outrage subsided and a placated population observed silence. A mournful family’s gathering was attended by the President of India; as a token of condolence, with wide arms he approached Avanti, but she recoiled in horror. Tears welled in her eyes; with sobs interlaced with implacable hiccupping, she cried “My brother found out that the fabric of space is unfolding at a speed greater than that of light. His analysis of G2110 proved that the star’s reeling past is a monument of proof that the expanding universe is undergoing an unpredictable and rapid shift locally.” The president was taken aback, but regained in time to permit a grin. “Can you prove the sudden unpredictable local expansion?” he acquiesced the tearful bemoan of a devastated sister.
A team of scientists were appointed under the special jurisdiction of the president. In about a month’s time, findings were shared with the president. Avanti who worked closely with the scientists was present at the occasion. It was a big hall with hundred odd scientists from all the nations. A public announcement was made available to the press in the form of a printed sheet with the graphical demonstrations. A tall scientist wearing rimless glasses read out from his booklet “the death of astronauts on chandrayan 18 proves incontrovertibly that our observable universe is in a local crease of an unimaginably vast and complex universe….the fabric of cosmos is expanding at a rate faster than the Einstein’s proposed limit, for the expansion falls outside the corridors of observable universe…since the unidentifiable portion of the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, light from those receding parts will never reach our universe……and hence we establish now, that the observable universe is locked up perpetually in a crease/ fold of the fabric with the rest of the universe abandoning us mercilessly….we would also like to add that if not for the genius of Shashank, we would never have come to discover this fact.”
Many years later, Avanti, aged sixty would release a short story of 1500 words, an elegy in praise of her brother.
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