‘Apparently, the N62 neutron star of our galaxy is exhibiting strange fluctuations.’ I rode into my metal girded sandals, activated the tracking device, and stepped out into the open. Mother darted off to the window and threw an apple downstairs. I flung my gown up like a net and apprehended the gravitating fruit. Mother waved her chapatti dough stained hand and I reciprocated with a smile that reddened my puffed cheeks. Climbing up the leather upholstered narrow staircase of the school bus, I flung my head back and waved again. I thrust my ID card into the swipe machine and the rubber padded glass doors opened to reveal an empty bus. Just as empty as I thought it would. On Sundays, the school bus swished past the empty streets like a hungry whale with an empty stomach through deserted waters. Settling down on the last row near the window, I thrust my hand into the blue button and the monitor came alive. What was on? It was the video recording of the school principal from the day before. Nobody knew where he was. He was missing for the last two days.
It was a thrill to visit school on Sundays. So vacuous and strangely romantic, if ever Martians visited our planet, I would have advised that they visit schools on Sundays. Drawing rings out of her hair, our physics teacher was standing in an anticipative mood in the lab. We exchanged pleasantries; I went over to the locker, pressed my thumb into the green slat and waited for it whirr and purr. The canister shaped locker case opened and I dropped my lunch box into it. Returning to the teacher, I noticed that she had done her hair up into voluminous thick black braid and coiffed it up with a mesh. Yes, mother did that too. Retro fashion was in vogue these days.
‘Shravani, I want you to keep a watch on the numbers here,’ she pointed to the screen before her, ‘and if the red shift becomes apparent which I have estimated to happen in a day or two,’ she was chewing a gum. She took her time and added ‘call me.’ Baring her front teeth, she scratched her chin, squinted hard at the numbers as if her straining was going to alter the course of N62’s shimmering life. For the rest of the day, I took to jotting down the numbers at regular intervals. When it was time for lunch, the teacher asked me if I would be willing to join her. Of course, I gladly accepted. By afternoon, there were three other students, seniors, form seventh standard. While they sat before the monitor, I and the teacher went upstairs for lunch. Climbing up the matted stone staircase, I said ‘teacher, if N62 was from the cluster of 18 solar masses stars,’ my gown’s frill was caught up in the exposed timber of the balustrade. I reached for it, unhooked the leaked thread and flattened the pleat around my ankle so the thread was swallowed back into the gown’s frill. Teacher was presently pressing her foot hard on a bump in the mattress. Pressing her lips tight, she swept the air mound under the carpet further and further away until it was washed out at the edge. Now she turned around to face me. It was a strange feeling to talk to my teacher on a Sunday. She was not the usual self, very jovial, in a light mood and always inviting for a friendly chat. To see the same teacher on a weekday in the class being all strict and incurably teacher-like: she fascinated me. I wished to become like her. She was my role model; the best teacher of our school.
‘Now N62 has shrunk to around 8 solar masses,’ I sneezed, excused myself, and added ‘so, it could end up collapsing into anything.’ I brandished my wide pupils to let her know that I knew what I was talking about. She took it with great insouciance.
‘Yes, gravitational collapse of a star can lead to anything from a white dwarf to a black hole. But N62, as our observations show has enough residual mass to go past the Chandrasekhar limit.’ She bit into a sandwich stuffed with onion rings, tomato curls and cabbage peels. I unrolled the chapatti mother made for me and examined the contents inside. Coated with ground nut powder and peppered a bit around the edges, the chapatti roll was just the right lunch I had in mind. My mother was the best of all.
I wiped my lips with the back of my hand and took a bite of the teacher’s sandwich. It was good; I told her right away that she must take a bite of my mother’s chapatti roll. She did and complimented duly. I thrust the mango pickle towards her and without hesitation, she daubed the end of her sandwich into it. I noticed how she pursed her lips tight as she managed to rub the back of her sandwich around the square ends of the pickle box. It occurred to me that the teacher and I shared a special relationship, a fortified love existed between us. We shared something that the other students would never have had the occasion for, yes, the teacher loved me more than anyone else in the class.
She continued the discussion after lunch. I was brushing the crumbs of my white gown when she began explaining. ‘Shravani, as long as a star’s collapsing force is halted by the electron degeneracy, it turns into a white dwarf. In such stars, gravitational collapse forces electrons into lower orbits as much as possible. Beyond a point, any further transition of electrons form higher orbits to lower requires far greater forces than what a star of greater than 1.44 solar mass can accomplish.’ Mother was going to scold me for this. I dirtied my gown. A tomato peel must have slipped out of the brown bread ridge and fallen on my lap. What more? The peel carried a bit of mango pickle with it. Ah! This was terrible. Mother was certainly going to toss me out of the window tonight. While I continued to muse nonsensically, she stately held the window grill, leaned against the frame with the fold of her hand and let her mind take her elsewhere.
I noticed that the sky outside was growing dark with puffed up clouds groping each other in a caress and they comingled their separate existences. Tut, tut, tut, it began raining and some drops landed on her midriff as she bared it unconsciously in the leaning posture. She turned around with her back to me, and wrestled with the window that was blown away flat against the wall outside. She stretched like a cat on its haunches; through the grilled window frame, she arched her torso and strained with her longish hand to drag the window back to its place. Rain beat down on her face and wetted her blouse slightly. Now rain drops, like beads of sweat, stood transfixed on her skin like they were caught off-guard.
Back in the lab, she pressed a dry towel to her rain pattered face and asked the boys about the readings. They submitted their readings and took leave for the day. I pointed to the monitor and asked her again. She said ‘Shravani, if the star is massive and if the gas clouds are dense enough to get past the electron degeneracy level, now the collapsing star is halted by the neutron degeneracy. At this point, what’s left of the star is only neutron gas.’ Yes, that made sense. But I knew that much already. I also knew that if a collapsing star got past the neutron barrier as well, it shrunk into a black hole.
Later that night at home, I told mother about my day. How I shared my chapatti rolls with the teacher and how her bread crumbs had stained my gown. Stain! My mother yelped. She steadied my gown that was billowing in the night breeze. We were sitting in the balcony on the seventh floor; it can get quite windy up there. The stain had perhaps become irreparable, for mother grabbed me by the hand and thrust me into my room. I followed her orders; slipped out of the gown, changed into night pajamas and examined the stain myself. It looked like a bad one, it looked like a splash of ink with tendrils spreading outside from the center of the splash.
Next morning, in the class, the teacher called me up to present the readings of N62 to the class. She asked the class ‘what’s the fate of this star?’ From the workouts, it was immediately apparent that the star was shrinking past the white dwarf stage and settling down as a neutron star. It won’t become a black hole, for the collapse was not strong enough to shear past the neutron degeneracy. I knew that. Of course, some of the front benchers were quick to roll their sleeves and sing a cuck-a-doodle-do of answers ranging from 1.44 to about 12 solar masses. I was standing beside the teacher with the duster raised in my right hand and hoisted up to the word N62 on the board. Teacher singled me out to stand by the board. She always did that. Oh, how I loved her for that; I was her favourite student.
With a bit of a rush, she patted on the new girl’s shoulder in the front bench. With pig tails and glinting earrings that brushed her shoulders when she tossed her head to the left and to the right, this new girl was turning into a nuisance to me. I could already see that the teacher was encouraging the new girl; undue attention. I did not like this. I did not share my teacher’s enthusiasm at all. ‘Shravani, let the new girl carry those,’ she pointed to the wad of notebooks and clipped papers on the desk. ‘But why, teacher, you don’t have to do this. Please! You and I should not let a new pig tailed posy scarfed, ear-ringed and immeasurably pretentious girl to get in our way.’ Well of course I wished I could say that to the teacher. But I all I could manage was a yes. I heard few giggles in the back.
After a while, I slipped out of the class, climbed down the cement staircase and reached the lab. Teacher always spent her time between classes in the lab. I was bound to find her there. I furtively neared the door that was closed. At an arm’s length, I grabbed the door knob, turned it clockwise and in a moment of great alacrity, heard a pair of feet coming in towards me. It was the teacher. She was holding a laptop bag in the tuck of her arm and a curtain in her other arm. ‘There you are. About N62,’ with the curtained arm, she opened the door and let me in, ‘any leisure periods today?’ I told her. She said ‘Oh that is marvelous. Isn’t it? So the social teacher is on leave today. Alright then, come and see me in the afternoon.’
Later in the afternoon, when I went to see her, I noticed that the pleated curtain was stretched nicely on a taut spring over the window. It was a pale white meshed curtain with two green peacocks knitted on it. Teacher was busy with something, so I had time examining the curtain. She had done it herself. My teacher knitted those peacocks. How so lovely? The tails were exquisitely knitted with green wool that felt soft to the touch of my palm. As I rubbed my palm on the spread-eagled tails of the peacocks, the soft bumps of wool alternated with stiff netted curtain fabric made it almost impossible to look elsewhere. One of the peacocks wore a longer neck and teasingly pointed at the other one with the parted beak. Crowned with red wool and matted with light green rushes, the garden setting for the peacocks was at first not apparent. Any other person would not have noticed it. Only I could notice it.
‘Shravani, could you come here after you are done with the curtain?’ I liked the way she put it. There was a hint of smile on her lips. I told her how much I liked her curtain. She nodded her head and pointed to the monitor before her. I looked at her bangled hand and her manicured fingers. Now she flung her arms about, reached for the phone and began dialing. I looked at the monitor; the readings made no sense. Of course, although precocious, I could only know so much. ‘Not that, read about the exhibition will you.’ She had opened the science exhibition page on her laptop; while she spoke to the gentleman who was conducting the exhibition, I rolled my eyes over the contents of the web page. It was going to be a weeklong exhibition, was to be conducted in the town hall and was starting only next week. Teacher told me how she wanted me to represent the physics department of our school. They would take N62’s real-time readings and present them at the exhibition. I widened my pupils. What did this mean? Oh, we will be spending a lot of time together.
But something happened and the teacher avoided me for the whole week. What did I do? Was it about the curtain? I should have emphasized how divine the knitting was. Why was she avoiding me? She was not even making it to the school. For the rest of the week, I frequented the lab throughout the day. What was going on? I spoke to other teachers. I asked my mother. No one knew a thing. There had to be someone who could point me to her. Was she ill? Where was she? What about the exhibition?
A new physics teacher walked into our class next week. He was a tall man, lean, stiff posture, and wore his shirt un-tucked. His chappal on the right foot had lost its toe-ring; bottoms of his trousers were frayed like the shriveled ends of red blood cells under microscope. His mustache snailed over the upper lip like a patch of blackened corpse; he had the habit of picking his nose between flipping pages of our notebooks as he sat for correcting them. His pen leaked ink into the shirt pocket; oh yes, he was the old type and insisted on papers when we could all take e-exams. A mole on the bridge of his nose grew hair like the weed on a hilltop. When he leaned over to strike a word in my notebook and write a new one over it, I noticed the bristled nostrils that were like breathing sinkholes. His collar was ruffled and the backsides of his palms were rouged white with excessive soaping. When he laughed, he bared his lower gums that reminded me of a frog’s innards. His eyebrows, thick and bushy; his cheeks pigmented and speckled with recent measles’ attack; his eye lashes that barely flapped; and his ears that protruded outwards incongruously…
Oh, but the others liked him. Every boy and girl in the class liked him immensely. He was a breeze, ‘a powerful narrator’ they said. He narrated the events of scientific history as though they were a fable. He held a degree, they said, he was better than my teacher. This chimp faced balding old man was better than my teacher? The weaseled cunning wussy! I hated him for taking my teacher away from me. That evening, he called for me. I went to the lab and found him throwing away the contents of my teacher’s locker into a dustbin. Her lipstick, crocodile hair pin, three tear drop shaped brooches, some crinkled papers screwed into balls, a felt tip pen, a comb, a perfume bottle, mascara, eye liner, brushes, and a kohl paste tube. He showed me inside ‘the science exhibition coordinator called,’ he wrapped up my teacher’s contents into a plastic bag and tossed into the corner of the room. ‘Shravani, why didn’t you participate? Your teacher would have wanted you to.’ I asked him if he knew where she was. At this, he eyed me curiously like I was a cockroach. The sinkhole nostrilled man…
Next day at school, the police was talking to our teachers one by one. What was going on? It was all hush-hush. No one knew a thing. There was a commotion in the principal’s room. Then I noticed a policeman carrying the peacock curtain. We were rushed inside, our PT teacher, a broad shouldered man in tight jeans, marshaled us into our classrooms. Apparently, my teacher had died in an accident. A car crash; her research pursuits in radio astronomy took her to the world’s largest radio dish in China. The dish was being constructed on a hilltop in a remote location. It was so remote that the news of a landslide reached the mainland china only a day and a half later. It killed everyone.
That night, I sobbed until my eyes swelled and my cheeks wore tear stained trickles.
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