Nimita's Place

  “Is ma’am in?” Vicky asked me, as though he had just come back from a holiday. Maybe he had. He looked great. Lost a bit of weight too.

  Is ma’am in? What about: “Sorry, I’m really sorry I missed the wedding and worried you” or “I’m sorry, let’s get a cream bum and I’ll explain everything”?

  Dr Savarkar came out of her office. “Vikram,” she said, folding her arms. “So you’re back.”

  The woman with Vicky spoke. “I’m very sorry, Dr Savarkar. Let me explain.”

  “You are?”

  “My name is Aditi Malhotra. I’m Vicky’s sister. If we could just speak in your office?”

  “Okay, come in,” said Dr Savarkar and she looked at me for some reason. “You’d better have a good explanation.”

  That was the last thing I heard before the door closed and stayed closed for an hour. An hour that I spent trying to eavesdrop on what was happening while also trying to figure out why my water hyacinth plants were not turning purple in the presence of a concentrated solution of chromium ions.

  The cells were expressing the indicator protein and appeared dull green under fluorescent light. This meant that the genetic engineering method was probably working and that they were taking up the engineered DNA. The cells were just not expressing the gene sequence that would make the leaves change colour in the presence of chromium, a major industrial pollutant. Why weren’t they expressing the engineered DNA?

  Dr Savarkar’s office door opened and Vicky walked out with his sister. “I’ll see you in the lab tomorrow,” Dr Savarkar said after them. “Don’t be late.”

  “No, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am,” Vicky said. He waited till the door closed again before coming to my workbench. “Didi, this is Nimita,” he said.

  We shook hands.

  “Nice to finally meet you. I’ve heard lots about you,” she said. “I’m really sorry Vicky couldn’t go to Delhi with you, but maybe you and your family can come visit us in Hong Kong?”

  Hong Kong? My family? Only Dad and Mummy had passports in case of an emergency with Romy-Bhaiya in the States.

  I must have said something polite to Aditi because she smiled at me. “Okay, I’m going back to the hotel. I guess you’ll come later, Vicky?”

  “Yes, Didi. I’ll just talk to Nimmy first.”

  “Good.” She looked at me. “Nice to meet you. I’m here till Sunday. I hope we can have dinner together.”

  Vicky and I looked at each other. Rishikesh Sahni was in the cold room, but Lakshwant Chavan, the other post-grad, was spending a lot of time cleaning his workbench. “Cream bum?” Vicky said.

  “Oh, yes.” I got out of my chair. “It’s your treat.”

  The chai order given, Vicky reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a silver paper packet. “This is for you,” he said. “Please open it.”

  Inside was a dark green pendant. “Jade,” he said. The pendant and earrings were encased in silver and shaped to look like dragons. There was also a silver chain for the pendant.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, because it was. It was also the exact shade of the outfit I had worn for Romy-Bhaiya’s sangeet. I said that too.

  “I’m really sorry,” Vicky said. “I asked Didi to send this last month. I wanted to give it to you to wear for the sangeet.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wanted us to dance together at the wedding. I really wanted to come.”

  “So what happened to you then?”

  He stayed quiet until the tea came. After drinking half his cup, he said: “Have you ever wondered why I’m here in Pune? Studying here?”

  “Because it’s a good university?”

  He laughed. “Yah, sure it is. But there are better universities for molecular biology and nearer Hong Kong too. Like, Singapore. Even the University of Hong Kong itself.”

  I didn’t like the way he was talking. India is big, so big that it would take a lifetime to fully see it. How then could I know anything about countries abroad? We spoke of the US because of all the good research happening there, but people like Dr Savarkar had come back from the States to set up schools in India just as good.

  Maybe the University of Hong Kong was a good school too. All I knew of Hong Kong was what Dadi’s friends had talked about because they had taken the 15-day Five Star Cruise tour to Hong Kong and Singapore.

  “The University of Hong Kong is ranked first in Asia. The National University of Singapore is ranked thirtieth in the world and third in Asia, if you’re talking cell and molecular biology. Pune University only just makes it to the global top hundred and Asia’s top fifty.”

  “Go back to Hong Kong then,” I said and got up.

  “Sorry.” He reached out and put his hand on mine. “I’m sorry. I’m saying this wrong. Please sit.”

  I sat.

  His hand got sweaty under mine so I moved my palm. He pulled it back.

  “Please?”

  I left my hand in his.

  “Okay. Look, Pune University is great, it really is. I really wanted to come here. I wanted to get in here because I was under a lot of pressure in Hong Kong.” Pressure?

  “See, my dad and I don’t get on very well. There is this… He has this…” Sweat drops appeared on his face, a trail trickling down his neck. His hand damp in mine, shivering. “My dad and I just don’t get along very well, okay? He just hates me.”

  When I pulled my hand away this time, Vicky let me.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes!” People around us turned their heads. He glared at them and they looked away. “I’m under a lot of pressure, Nimmy.”

  Oh. I got it.

  “Sorry, my brother’s wedding was putting you under so much pressure. You really didn’t have to come.”

  He hissed. “Listen, you stupid idiot, I just had a big fight with my dad because he wants me to marry some girl in Delhi. Don’t make me regret it.”

  The sweat dried on my back, chilling the skin. “What? What girl?”

  Vicky waved his hand. “It doesn’t matter. There’s this girl, Vimla, Dad and her father are friends. My father has been pushing me to marry her for years now.”

  We were only twenty. But some families do believe in early marriage.

  “So you came to Pune because you don’t want to marry this Vimla.” What a common name, Vimla. Like the name of a washing powder. “So what was the family emergency in Hong Kong?”

  “Same thing.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Vicky’s cellphone buzzed. He took it out of his pocket. “Sorry. Hi. Yes, Didi. No, I haven’t asked her yet. Okay, I’ll talk to you later.” He put the phone on the table.

  “Vicky?”

  “Huh? Sorry.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “That was Aditi-Didi. She wants to know if you can join her for dinner today.”

  “Vicky, right now I’m not sure I want to even have tea with you.” I pushed my chair back.

  “Sit down!” He pressed his lips together. “Look, I’m sorry. Please, just let me tell you everything okay? It’s not just Dad and his stupid insistence on my marriage. I have a lot of things going on right now.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I had to go to Hong Kong for a medical appointment.”

  My skin crawled. “Vicky, are you sick?”

  He moved his shoulders. “Dad thinks so.” The way he said it, I would never want anyone to speak that way about me. “Dad thinks I’m sick in the head. But I’m not, Nimmy. I just, I just don’t always deal with stress very well. I have these episodes. Like panic attacks.”

  I had to wear a mouth guard in my first year at university because I was grinding my teeth. “It happens.”

  “These things happen, yeah. But you know, Hong Kong, it’s very Western. People pop tranquilisers like you eat Chiclets chewing gum. It makes Dad and Didi happy so I take them. I was under a lot of pressure the last few weeks, so they insisted I come to Hong Kong for a checkup.”

  My neck felt very cold. “Yo
u had to take tranquilisers to come to my brother’s wedding?”

  “No!” He grabbed my hand. I said, “Ow!” but he kept on squeezing it. “Nimmy, listen, I wanted to go to the wedding, I want to meet your family, you have to believe me.”

  “Okay. Okay, but let go of my hand. You’re hurting me.”

  “No, you have to understand.”

  “I understand.” I twisted my hand out of his. “When I say let go, Vicky, I mean it. Let go.” His fingers had left marks on the side of my palm. The left palm that time.

  “Sorry. Sorry.” He held his hand up. “Sorry. But really, please, Nimmy, you have to believe me. It wasn’t the wedding. I wish you’d believe me. I brought my sister to meet you so you’d believe me.”

  He had, so I nodded.

  “Okay. Okay, good.” He breathed out and in again a few times. “What really is stressing me out is the project. The algae are not going well. They’re going really badly, in fact. They just won’t express the protein I want them to express. They take in the DNA all right, the fluorescent protein indicator shows up fine in the control, but the actual gene sequence is not being expressed.”

  The way to check whether the DNA you make is being taken in by the cells you want to mutate is to do a control set. In the control set, another batch of the cells you want to mutate are given DNA that creates a protein, which appears bright under special light. Both Vicky and I seemed to have the same problem: the control cells produced fluorescence but the cells given the DNA did not produce the special proteins we were trying to get.

  Hmm? Hold on.

  “Any moment now, Dr Savarkar is going to throw me out of her lab and fail me,” Vicky said.

  I wasn’t paying attention.

  “You’re using the P3 Fluorescence Kit, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So am I. And I’m not getting results either. Did you take photos of your control cells?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go back to the lab and check.”

  We went back to the lab and checked our cells. There were pinpoints of light inside the cells, enough that we had both considered our controls successful. They looked nothing like the vibrant green networks of light the manual had suggested we would see under the microscope, though.

  “False positives,” I said. Something, maybe an excess of indicator chemical, was making it look as though the cells were fluorescing, but actually they had not taken up the DNA.

  “You think?”

  “I’m positive.”

  We showed the photos to Dr Savarkar and she agreed to buy a new fluorescence kit. Most likely our DNA delivery system had to be changed and retested with the new kit.

  QED. Quite easily done and Dr Savarkar wasn’t even angry. Though she did say that we should have realised this earlier.

  “I told you she’d be upset.”

  I laughed at Vicky. “Call that upset? Are you sure you’re Punjabi?”

  He wasn’t listening. “I should have realised this sooner.”

  “What?” I slapped his hand so he would pay attention. “Vicky, don’t be an idiot. Research is like this, na? Highs and lows? We have a one in a million chance of finding out something new so why should we get upset when 999,999 experiments fail? The millionth will work, na?”

  “Maybe,” he said, heading to his lab bench. I followed him, speaking softly so that the post-grads wouldn’t hear.

  “You really thought that one setback was getting you kicked out of the lab?”

  “Yes.”

  “Vicky, she’s our supervisor. Our teacher. She’s meant to help us, not, not destroy us.”

  “I suppose.”

  “You suppose? Vicky, that’s ridiculous.”

  I didn’t understand much then about paranoia or mental disorders and how what’s obviously stupid to one person is an immovable truth for another. Aditi tried to explain it to me at dinner that night but I really didn’t understand.

  3.

  My body is like a stone, but I force myself to move, to do aarti, to take the MRT to work. I don’t know why I bother. Hardly any work is being done in the lab this week. In fact, all of Singapore has stopped doing anything since the prime minister declared a week of national mourning for his father. No flat viewings are scheduled and there are stories in the paper of people delaying weddings. Delaying weddings, can you imagine?

  Everyone is treating this like some personal tragedy. I am the only one altering bacteria, extracting DNA, running gels. The minus-four-degree lab is even colder these days because no one else wants to use it.

  Dr Alagasamy is hardly in because he’s busy attending high-level meetings about how SGH should mourn. Everyone else has frozen their samples so they can go stand for five, six, eight hours in line to bow before a dead body. Even opposition politicians who fought the dead man for years queue up to pay their respects. No riots, no morchas, no tamasha.

  With no boss to discuss results with, I end up with Santha and Bala and Siddiqui in the long line in front of the Parliament building where Lee Kuan Yew’s body is lying in state. The queue stretches behind the building, around a giant green field, all the way back to the City Hall MRT station nearly a kilometre away.

  Santha takes bottles of water from the volunteers distributing them to the mourners. “Should have bought something to eat also,” she says, taking an umbrella out to shield her face from the sun.

  “I can go get something from the mall,” I say. “What will everyone have?”

  Returning with packed sandwiches and salads, I find the queue has almost doubled. People must have taken a half-day holiday to do this, to wait in line and see the dead body of the man who made their country what it is today.

  Volunteers on crowd control push new ropes and barricades to align the herd of people. Security staff insist I have to go the long way around to find my colleagues.

  Nearing the Parliament building, I nearly bump into a family with a wheelchair. “Sorry,” I say and then look at the woman pushing the handles. “Lalita-Aunty?”

  “Hello, beta,” she smiles at me, two wrinkles on her forehead.

  “Nimita. I came to your place to meet Geeta-Aunty that time.”

  “Oh yes, of course, Gautam’s fiancée. How is he doing beta? Daddyji, remember Nimita?”

  “Namaste, Uncleji.” It will take too long to correct her.

  “You’re also standing in line to see Lee Kuan Yew?”

  “Yes, but it will take a long time, I think.”

  “Do you want to come with us? They are giving priority to wheelchair users.”

  “I have to give lunch to my colleagues.”

  “Do that and come back.”

  “No, Aunty, that wouldn’t be fair.”

  “I’m sure they won’t mind. Ask them.”

  Santha and Siddiqui take their sandwiches and immediately tell me to go back to Lalita-Aunty. Even Bala nods over his salad.

  Back to the wheelchair-access queue and Lalita-Aunty is offering Uncleji a bottle of water. “No, no, no no,” he says. “No. No.”

  She caps the bottle and puts it back in her bag. “Daddyji insisted on coming. We told him he shouldn’t bother but he insisted.” Her eyes are wet.

  “Great man,” Uncleji says. “Very great man, Naina.”

  “This is Nimita, Daddyji.”

  Uncleji reaches out and pats my arm. “He did a lot of things for this country, Naina. Some were very good. Some,” he breathes heavily, “some not so good. Very bad. He took my land.”

  “Daddyji,” Lalita-Aunty says.

  “But, beta,” Uncleji’s eyes are very bright, “beta, he changed our lives. Look at us.”

  I stand with them until security personnel tell Lalita-Aunty only one person can go in with the wheelchair.

  “I need help with Daddyji. Let my niece come in with me.”

  “It’s okay, Aunty. I’ll go find my colleagues.” I say goodbye and walk back to the MRT.

  Some very good things. Some very bad things.
Strange, what Uncleji says of the man who took his home, who changed his life.

  Vicky changed my life. The day I learnt about his paranoia disorder—he didn’t use the words, Aditi did—I started reading up on the condition. We had dinner at his flat the same evening and while Vicky put the leftovers away, Aditi explained quietly that he was on medication, that he would be fine if he took the pills, but sometimes things might get too much for him. That was when he needed the support of his loved ones, and also for them to drag him to a doctor. He might say things or do things that would be difficult for us to accept or understand but we had to be strong for him and kind to him because he really couldn’t help what was happening.

  “Do you understand, Nimita?” she asked. “Do you really?”

  What could I say? I was just learning how little I knew about the person I thought was my best friend. It scared me. It scared me so much.

  At the same time, I reminded myself, he was still my friend, the student who helped the entire molecular biology first-year class through the first month. If I was topping the class now, it was only because he offered help. Now he needed me, how could I refuse?

  I was also flattered. Vicky needed me. I could do this. This is the sort of thing you do when you love someone, na?

  And he was fighting family pressure to stay with me and not that washing powder Vimla. He was serious about us.

  In the months after Aditi returned to Hong Kong, I was certain this relationship—my existence—would cure Vicky. It happened in stories, na? Beauty changed the Beast. Satyavati followed the death god Yama to his kingdom to get back her husband Satyavan.

  I read so much. I read the paper that linked obesity to depression and decided Vicky’s weight gain during the project must have triggered his symptoms. I made him start going on long walks with me. In a few weeks he even started jogging, which was good because that paper said exercise keeps patients with mental illness on an even keel.

  The jogs helped. It helped that his final-year project also started going well.