From university to home

We are both looking at each other across the corridor, keenly. One difference is that he is smiling, but I’m not.

Well, to be absolutely honest, there are two other big differences. Number one is that he is a Nobel Laureate, and guess what am I! Number two is that he is dead, and I’m sort of alive. . . So you want to know his name? He’s Richard Feynman - Nobel Prize winner in Physics in 1965.

The picture is quite big, probably three feet by two. It’s the last one in the corridor. But for me, it’s the most interesting of them all. . .

I think it’s due to the smile and that razor-sharp yet mischievous gaze, plus the way he’s resting his chin on the three fingers of his left hand. It’s like the man is seeing right through you! And any moment he’ll give you a wink and laugh aloud saying, “Aha! Caught you red-handed my friend!”

Anyway, he’s keeping me good company as I wait for the pressure of the autoclave to come down, so that Arunda can open it and give me my conical flask containing 50 ml of YPD agar. Right now he’s sitting to my left on the top of this bench, rubbing two rectangular wood pieces together, probably in the hope of re-discovering the original method by which human beings acquired the ability to light a fire! Jokes apart, I think he’s also trying out ways to let these idle minutes pass by without giving them much thought.

But I kind of like it sitting with my back to the wall on this bench. The end of the corridor at the Biochemistry Department is calm and quiet at the moment, half-an hour past nine in the night. Arunda and I are not talking. We’re just sitting and waiting, and I’m looking at Mr. Feynman while he’s playing with his wooden fire-starting equipment. At times it feels nice just to sit silently with someone you know at your side, and do nothing but pass the time. . .

Shounakda-s wife, whose name I don’t know, is coming this way. As she is about to enter AKDG-s lab, Azharda and Siddharthada comes out. Both of them almost go past her, then suddenly turn around and congratulate her for something. In reply she asks them to come inside the lab and have some sweets. Azharda insists that all the sweets are gone, but she won’t let them go. So in the end they follow her inside the lab and the door closes.

The pressure reading has not come down much in the last five minutes, just like the five minutes before that. But somehow it doesn’t bother me. . .

Azharda and Siddharthada come out again. They talk to each other as Azharda kneels down to tie his shoelaces. This is the guy who single-handedly cooked more than eighty luchis for breakfast in the jungles of Orissa four days ago. Right now he’s bent down in front me adjusting his snickers. Nine hours ago I was strolling on the banks of Hooghly with Saurav, Bikram and Sayan at the Strand in Chandan Nagore. And now I’m killing time to get a small 100 ml conical flask in my hands at the sixth floor of Ballygunge Science College. Life is stranger than fiction. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . Damn it man! In & Out is closed! Now where will I get a packet of biscuits at Ballygunge Phari at twent past ten pm?! Hey, hold on a minute, can it be. . . yes! Rajeshda is stiil there at his phuchka stall! Brilliant! It looks like he’s getting ready to leave. But I know he’ll not say ‘No’ to me even at this hour. . .

. . . For the past ten minutes I’ve been hiding from Arunavoda, Arindamda and Sudiptoda standing on the other side of Phari. Fortunately they didn’t notice me at Rajeshda’s, gorging on twenty-five rupees worth of phuchka, when I was supposed to have left the lab fifteen minutes ago and caught a bus home! Come on now, its past ten-thirty – haven’t those guys chatted enough in the lab for the past ten or so hours? Why don’t they just hop onto a bus, or auto, or taxi, or something and let me be in peace?! Don’t their legs hurt standing for so long after such a long day? Mine do! Well, I don’t mind much. But you know people – they see you somewhere and start asking what you were up to, as if it was the most important thing in the world for them to know, when in reality they don’t give a shit! Why can’t I stand at a bus-stop wherever I want to, whenever I want to, for whatever time I want to – without being afraid of being asked questions?

Mother had called. Now she knows she’ll have to wait for another 40 minutes at the dinner table or so before her genius son returns home after a remarkable day’s work in the lab, inventing newer and smarter ways of doing who-the-hell-knows-what! She must be so proudly tired and hungry after working in the office the entire day. . .
So then, let’s allow her some loneliness for some more time. I will do only as I wish. Since I can’t find any buses to Phoolbagan, I will catch that two-forty to Sealdah, get down at Sealdah station flyover, go to Kalpataru, have a big bhar of Lassi, then take an auto going to Beleghata Building More, get off at Alochhaya cinema hall, and walk for ten minutes before I reach home. Lucky Ali, Strings and 30 Seconds To Mars will be there with me as I walk down the empty street. Unfortunately the in-built memory card of my phone doesn’t have space for more than three mp3 songs! And out of a fanatic determination not to waste my parents’ money, I didn’t spend three hundred and twenty-five rupees only to buy a 2 GB memory card either. Therefore I end up listening to the same three songs over and over again and then I change them after a week. But it’s better than listening to all the bakwas blabbering in FM channels, in return for barely four or five good songs in an hour. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . Thundering typhoons! Kalpataru was closed! I did see the shop-owner talking to his neighbourhood shop-owner who was still open, but I controlled the urge to take the big dustbin in front of his shop, all full of broken bhars, and break them some more by emptying it on his head! While I was passing through the crowded station on my to the auto-stand, I walked past a homeless man sitting with his rags and clothes on the road. He was sitting exactly like Feynman – chin on the palm of his left hand like Sukanto and the hint of a smile on his face. Although he was not looking at me – in fact he was not looking at anyone or anything in this mortal world at all! I don’t think he could have cared a tiniest bit about what was going on around him. But that smile. . . ah, yes – I doubt whether even Ratan Tata, or Amir Khan, or Sachin Tendulkar can be seen smiling like that too often. . . it was the smile of a man truly at peace with himself and everyone else. Getting to taste lassi or getting to taste the bitterness in your mouth after not getting to taste lassi is all the same to him. . .

. . . Eleven-ten and I’m at Alochhaya cinema hall. The road stretches out in front. . . somewhere in the end I’ll have to take a right turn, walk next to a park, go through the park, and on the other side my mother will be waiting for me in a first-floor sitting room of a two-storied house. As I start walking, I watch my shadow in the pavement walking side-by-side. I ask myself – who do you think you are? A cool guy, because you keep others waiting for you by returning late every night?! A hero, because you can have phuchka at Ballygunge Phari at ten-thirty pm?! Well, all of it is simply a load of crap. So please don’t go home, stand in front of the mirror and ask, “mirror, mirror on the wall/tell me who is the most ‘different’ of them all”! But what one can easily do is enjoy just being himself or herself, and enjoy the little weird things that we do from time to time that define who we are. So enjoy this ten minute walk tonight, not because it proves anything to anyone, but because it means you tried to be as you like to be. . .

. . . And 30 Seconds To Mars bursts to life inside my earphones: “We were the kings and queens of promise/we were the victims of ourselves”. . . and I can see all those cyclists from the music video with my eyes closed – cycling down the empty streets of the big city together, with a sort of dream-like gaze, pushing the peddles with determination, going faster, going stronger, going further. . .