by Abha Dawesar
When fans said your work changed my life, Prem would ask, after overcoming his initial diffidence, how? He expected that readers had linked his ideas, disassembled his thoughts, somehow reconstructed the blueprint with which he had originally worked. But usually the reader spoke about a single book, sometimes even a chapter in a book. And Prem, disappointed, would nod. But then one day a fan quoted a single line and said, “That line changed my life.” Prem remembered that line—it was the culmination of two different blueprints. The line, measured in terms of Prem’s enormous graphing sheets, was a single dot reached and concluded through two series of ideas. The original blueprints were eighteen feet by twelve feet and fourteen by sixteen.
Once Prem had an idea, he couldn’t let go of it until he had come at it from every direction and with all the different intentions possible. He would stay at it like a pharmacologist measuring a molecule in a test tube in ever-more-diluted solutions till there was just a trace left. Prem examined an idea at a hundred percent of its weight and then at less and less till it was just under half its weight. Did an idea still exist at half its weight, or did it disappear? Some ideas persisted even as they motored on dying batteries; others perished as soon as they had anything less than full thrust. Life plodded on, leaking and dripping away till it whittled to the very last drop. Perfection, on the other hand, diminished and ceased to be with the slightest flaw.
Soon after he had moved to the United States from England, he caught up with Krishnan, an old friend from Oxford. Prem visited the up-and-coming computer science department at Stanford, where Krishnan invited Prem to sit in on a lecture, saying, “It’s a pretty basic class, and you’ll get a sense of what I’m doing with my life.”
Krishnan proceeded in his thick South Indian accent—eating his Hs and barking his Os—to draw a simple flow chart. And then another more complex one. Prem mulled over the fact that there was a discipline based entirely on this approach to action and decision making. In ten years the novel would be dead, and so would thinking. A complex flow chart would plot all scenarios and code them, just as Prem plotted his novels before writing them. Shaken up after the lecture, he told Krishnan about his blueprints.
“Can I see one?”
“Yes. They’re too big to carry around.”
Krishnan flew back to New York with Prem just to see the chart. He trod reverentially barefoot in the cold, uncarpeted living room and examined each arrow, circle, and square, pink and blue, that Prem had put on paper.
“So you’re color-coding according to probability—red for very likely, pink for maybe, and blue for unlikely?”
“Yes.”
“Wait, and you have your binaries in black and white.”
Prem nodded.
“And the arrows are dashed or solid depending on whether the movement from one step is necessarily linear or not. And then—” At this point Krishnan was shouting. Loud! is how Meher had dismissed their upstairs Tamilian neighbors in their childhood. Even when they are not fighting, they shout. Are they all deaf? Prem’s eyes wandered.
“I asked why you have some of these in binaries when they aren’t that obvious. Did you just decide as an author that you’d proceed on this premise?”
“No, that was the result of another chart, but basically in this case anything short of certainty would kick it into the opposite category.”
“Why? It’s not a binary. Do you have the flow chart behind this step?”
“I usually throw them away, but I kept this one. Let me find it.”
Prem returned with a stack of some ten pages. Krishnan scratched his head.
“Do you want some tea?”
“Yes. I would love some.”
Prem left Krishnan in his living room, relieved. His friend was going berserk. He remembered Krishnan on his worst days in Oxford as he was writing his mathematics thesis. Prem sighed and poured boiling water into a porcelain kettle. They were in for a long night.
“You’re right—this is a winner-take-all.” Krishnan had made his way to the kitchen and was less than four steps away, but he was speaking at the same volume as he would if he were addressing an auditorium of a hundred people without a microphone. The archetype of the brilliant Tamilian Brahmin. He grabbed Prem. “This is all the theory of programming. All of it.”
“It’s the way we all think, isn’t it? Maybe we don’t put it down on paper, but when we need to make a decision about something, we try examining it thoroughly and imagine various futures.”
“Yes, but you’ve given them probabilistic outcomes.”
“So? We weigh the likelihood of events.”
“But this is very sophisticated. You’ve not missed a single beat, iteration, recursion—anything. You’re looking at stochastic probabilities and root square regressions. You’ve pushed the boundaries of complexity theory in computation.”
“Do you want more sugar in your tea?” Prem had already put one spoon in the cup.
“You don’t get it! One needs mathematical tools for this. The more complex variations need mathematical tools.” Krishnan’s sentences rose and rose in volume. The last “mathematical tools” came out like a Help! Fire! call. Prem was reminded of a paragraph in his music book where he had tried to capture volume in his novel. That was the hardest to do. Patterns, music, harmony, discordance, pitch, tone, repetition were all easier. But how to get a page to be louder? He had wanted some repetitions of his sentences to approach a crescendo and others to drop off into silence. This was one of the easier things to do with real music and the hardest to do with text. Eventually he’d settled on a solution he was still not sure had worked. To fade to silence, he started with consonance and ended with assonance, and to gain volume, he used alliterations.
“Did you use integral calculus?”
“You know I don’t know any calculus. Don’t you remember the number of times you tried explaining it to me at Oxford?”
“But how have you measured the cumulative effects of all these minute changes?”
Prem laughed.
“You came up with all this without algorithms? Without calculus? Impossible!”
Prem touched Krishnan’s arm.
“Listen, you are the genius here. You’re seeing mathematics here just as you saw it in Sanskrit verse and Yeats and Shakespeare.”
“I am not talking about your language, Prem. I’m talking about your labor.”
“My language is my labor. I have no other.”
“Someone who studied these charts of yours can derive rules of calculus, the rules of programming, and then some.”
“If you ask a child to walk you through one of these steps, which is just a simple life situation, he’d ask the same questions: If this, then what? If that, then so. That’s all there is to it.”
Two weeks later Prem got a call from Krishnan asking if he could come back to New York with a colleague called Metz. Prem, in the middle of making final editorial changes to Dharma, was irritated by the intrusion.
“You don’t have a choice. This isn’t about you. This is the future of the field.” He had discussed Prem’s blueprints in detail with Metz. They had a hunch.
“We think that the way computers think, and will increasingly think as the technology gets better, is like humans.”
Had they flown across the vast American expanse to tell him this?
“Sure, this is how people think. And since people are designing the computers, they too will think like people.”
Metz and Krishnan spent two days crawling on all fours examining Prem’s flow charts. They then took his leave to rustle up a band of other wackos to discuss what they had seen. Wackos who went back pumped up to continue their work in artificial intelligence, cognitive science of mathematics, and neuroscience.
“Can we have your blueprint?” Metz asked over the phone a few days later.
“I’ll ask my agent, Edward, to send his assistant to pick it up and mail it. I refuse to go to the post office. Edward’s assistant does everything
for me.”
Edward told Prem that they were giving nothing away; his drafts and blueprints were potential archive material. Edward drew up a contract instead that allowed Metz’s department to officially take the blueprint on loan, albeit for free, for five years. This free loan was then extended for another fifteen years.
Twenty-two years later at the annual meeting of the Meta Disciplinary Association for Scientists in Cognition (MDASC), Prem was honored with a medal. The keynote speech was delivered by Mario Scatz, who had written a biography of the science of the brain. It was the first popular science book on the subject to hit the imagination of the general public. Millions of dollars of research money came pouring in as a result of the book’s popularity. Scatz had painstakingly documented Prem’s role for posterity.
Edward Black negotiated a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar deal for the original blueprint that Krishnan and Metz had worked with. It now sat behind bulletproof glass at the Cognitive Science Museum that had opened in Washington, D.C.
“Who will want to shoot a hole in this?” Prem asked, looking at the glass, which despite its thickness was entirely nondistorting. His blueprint was by the main entrance.
“By paying that price, they put a value on it. Now it’s artifact, jewelry, antique, just as anything valued at that price would be,” Edward replied.
“I’m glad that people can buy the fruit of that ridiculous chart for just fifteen bucks in paperback.”
Krishnan took Edward and Prem for lunch after showing them around the museum.
“I hate to say this for the thousandth time, but I still don’t understand the fuss,” Prem said.
“That day when Metz and I visited you, it became clear to us that the tools science has developed that made our field possible were somehow intrinsic to the human mind. Almost all minds work with rudimentary algorithms, we had never thought that more complex computation mechanisms were coded within the human brain, integral to it. And if we hadn’t seen your diagrams, we still might not know, because most brains can’t abstract on the fly to this degree of complexity. My brain can’t. To see such a high level of computation applied to simple ideas—by that I mean nontechnical ideas—was a revelation. That computational capacity of the brain is just a generalized mechanism, like the movement of a limb, and can be applied widely by the mind, just as a limb can be moved.”
“Forward, backward, up, down, sideways, rotated,” Edward added. Was Edward in on this? Prem looked alarmed.
“Yes,” Krishnan said, nodding in Edward’s direction. “A finite number of movements can be applied to an infinite set of applications.”
“I see.”
“Who knows, you might have saved us five months to ten years of work. There are times in science when you see a small sign and you go after it. This wasn’t a small sign. Even someone who wasn’t looking could have seen it.”
“You were both buzzing with energy. If Metz and you had seen a street peddler doodling a shape on a scrap of paper, you would have had the same ideas.”
“But no!” Edward said. “Imagine someone with a better nose than most people. Do you remember how my ex-wife Thalia could smell? A scientist observing her sense of smell would understand much more about the capacity for human smell than someone observing mine.”
“He’s right,” Krishnan muttered. But then he stared at Edward uncomprehendingly. Edward had followed everything. This was exactly what Krishnan and Metz had argued with the medal committee about Prem having been intrinsic to the whole discovery. A lesser mind would not have ignited their sparkplugs.
“To think my writing has been working all these years because it’s what a robot would have written,” Prem said dismissively.
“Your writing works because you,” Edward said, “work methodically, robotically, if you will, and this gives your ideas a rigor that is rare, almost extinct. Then you miraculously apply a layer of varnish over it. It’s like a curve-building exercise on a graph—the original points have coordinates, but the emergent figure is smooth. Parabolic.”
Edward caught Krishnan’s expression.
“Why are you so surprised?” Edward asked him.
“I didn’t know literary agents understood so much about cognition or parabolas.”
“I got curious after Prem told me about your reaction to his blueprints. I’ve been reading about the field ever since.”
“Edward represents other writers you know. I mean nonfiction writers. That guy who gave the annual lecture at your meeting is one of Edward’s writers too.”
“Prem means Mario Scatz,” Edward explained.
Krishnan chewed over his meal so slowly, his mouth almost ground to a halt. How could he explain that the blueprint had been “on loan” and had never been given over to the museum until its meaning was established and priced? What the MDASC had understood and processed about the history of the various fields falling under its umbrella over a period of decades and only after much interest from the nonscientific community, this man Edward Black had always known. Had Prem’s agent manipulated them all, strategically planting books that would focus on Prem as much as on the serendipity of the events that one weekend in the seventies?
“Did you ask Scatz to write what he did about Prem?” Krishnan asked. He was looking at Edward with a blind and blinding hostility.
Edward kept his cool.
“You and Metz told Scatz what to put in the book. It was the truth. Prem’s mind is like no other.”
Prem looked from one to the other. What was this now? He was over fifty years old with several books behind him that had gotten him a lot of recognition. He didn’t need the idiotic blueprint or the accidental help he might have given Krishnan anywhere on his biographical note. This whole business had been merely an amusement from the start.
Krishnan shut his eyes. Prem knew that Krishnan was trying to recollect something. He opened his eyes again.
“You are right,” he finally said, looking at Edward. The white pools of his vitreous humour relaxed like liquid that had just been allowed to flow.
Prem was glad the tension was easing up.
“It’s another matter that I might have asked Scatz to come back and ask you some pointed questions if you hadn’t told him the things you did. I had my own interests to keep in mind.” Edward looked at Prem when he said my own.
Krishnan smiled. He watched out too for those on his team, the junior scientists and graduate students and technical departmental staff he worked with, and even the couple of mentors he looked up to. He did watch out for their interests after all.
“Fair enough,” Krishnan said.
Prem was mobbed without warning after the concert. When the three-minute-long applause for the musicians came to a stop, various people arose simultaneously and moved toward Prem to shake his hand. As if expecting just that to happen, Prem stood up and put forth his hand. Thank you. That’s so kind of you. No, sorry, I’m not at all available these days. It’s a pleasure to be in Paris as usual.
The crowd of people abated. Prem rested a hand on Maya’s shoulder.
“Let’s go.”
At the exit they found their shoes. Someone pulled a chair for Prem to sit on while he put his shoes back on. Maya slipped into her orange sneakers, lifting one foot and then the other to press on its Velcro straps.
“That was heavily classical. Sometimes they sing more popular bhajans, like the last two short numbers. Were you able to endure the evening?” Prem asked as they stepped out.
“Yes. I loved it! It reminded me of Raga. I felt I was inside the book and here at the same time.”
“Which side did we come from?” Prem asked, looking at the board on the street that read:
Villa Seurat, voie privée. Georges Seurat, Peintre 1859–1871
“That way,” Maya said, looking at the board as well.
“We should go and see some Seurat at the Musée d’Orsay,” Prem said.
“I was going to force you to endure my kind of music one of these days
.”
“We can do both, n’est-ce pas?”
Maya nodded.
“What is your kind of music?”
“Younger.”
“These three guys were young,” Prem said defensively.
“But the music is old. My musician is older than them, but the sound is young.”
Maya wanted to tell him then that she had brought Sisters in the Louvre with her and ask if they could go to the Louvre instead, but he had ignored her comment on his music book. She decided she didn’t know Prem well enough yet.
Prem was afraid he would manipulate his sentiments for Maya or hers for him. He did not want to love her as though she were a character in his book. After he had finished Meher, every affair of his life had been intricately connected with books he had been writing. Sometimes he took the initial sense he had of a woman and found himself investing similar or related characteristics to a woman in his fiction. Then he would fall in love with the woman in his fiction and transfer back some of his sentiments for the fictional character to the one in real life. What had happened innocently and accidentally with Vedika he had turned subsequently into a sort of formula. A formula different from Pascal’s, better from the point of view of literature, but much worse from the point of view of personal life.