The young speaker was introduced by Abhijat’s colleague. A promising young man, Abhijat thought, listening—strong undergraduate pedigree, excellent Ph.D. program, already a number of well-regarded publications.
The young physicist moved across the half-circle stage as he spoke, framed by the floor-to-ceiling chalkboards. (Abhijat had yet to witness a speaker kneeling on the floor to utilize the bottom third of the available chalkboard space, but he felt sure that someday he would, that space becoming valuable real estate as the rest of the wall filled with equations.) As the young physicist became more and more nervous, his voice reached higher and higher into his register and began, here and there, to crack, betraying his youth, his sense of awe, of panicked reverence at addressing this group of scientists assembled before him.
“Afterward, there is of course propagation in a background,” the physicist said, looking out into the crowd as though to test his own certainty on the matter. “And now this complicated equation that we will forget about,” he said, smiling, trying his hand at a bit of levity. He had pulled down the screen that hung in front of the chalkboard and was now making notes on an overhead projector, his equation magnified on the screen behind him.
Abhijat began, without realizing it, to shake his head almost imperceptibly. To think that this young scientist was nervous partly because of him, because of the room full of scientists just like him.
“This shows great promise,” the speaker continued, animated. “They are highly desirable and very strange,” the young physicist said, smiling again, the overhead projecting onto his face as he moved in front of the screen.
What warmed Abhijat’s heart was the way this young scientist seemed to harbor such enthusiasm, bordering on genuine affection, for the particles, for the equations that predicted their existence.
“Oh, and this is my favorite one,” the young physicist said, his face lighting up.
Abhijat could remember being possessed by that kind of enthusiasm, that kind of energy, but it occurred to him that it had been quite a long time since he had felt it.
Since he had arrived at the Lab, the theoretical particle physics community had begun moving into an area of such high energy that the Lab’s current accelerator was unable to verify or disprove many of the most cutting-edge theories. And so, Abhijat, like many of his colleagues, found themselves stuck in the frustrating position of waiting for a machine of high enough energy to confirm these theories so that they might know whether they were on the right track or not.
What was at stake: the great prizes, the ones that ensured a place in the history of physics. For a theory that wasn’t proven by the experimental physicists was nothing more than an interesting idea.
Abhijat thought again of the rumor of the larger, faster accelerator. It could mean confirmation, validation of his work. Until then, almost all of the important physics prizes, eligibility for which required that the theory be confirmed by experiments as well as by standing the test of time, were out of reach for Abhijat and many of his colleagues.
He knew that some of his older colleagues had begun to wonder if they would live long enough to see their theories confirmed and their work recognized. And that many—including, Abhijat suspected, his friend and colleague Dr. Cardiff—had long ago let go of their hopes of this sort of recognition, of a Nobel or a Wolf. Abhijat, however, had not.
Dr. Cardiff seemed to Abhijat to be at peace with this. For Dr. Cardiff, it was the work, not the recognition, that seemed to bring him happiness, and at times, Abhijat found himself envious of such peace, though equally confused about how one might so easily set down the burden of one’s ambitions.
In this, Dr. Cardiff sometimes reminded Abhijat of his mother, who had always insisted that one could best find success by first finding peace and contentment.
At the conclusion of his presentation, the young speaker, as expected, took questions from the audience. They came rapid-fire. Some, Abhijat could tell right away, were attempts to trip up the young physicist. These were usually delivered by the speaker’s peers, who might use the opportunity to try to impress one of their senior colleagues. (Dr. Cardiff liked to joke that one could always spot such questions, for they inevitably began: “Let me preface my question by saying…”) Others were less a question and more a demonstration of the questioner’s familiarity with the work he referenced. When a good question came his way (these usually came from the older scientists, now eager to encourage their young colleagues), a smile floated across the face of the young scientist, and Abhijat watched how he paused in answering, as though trying to rein in a racing mind.
Days at home in the empty house, Sarala had begun practicing a flat, Midwestern accent, having studied her neighbors’ smooth Is, hard Ds, and clipped Ts. She watched herself in the mirror as she spoke, willing her mouth around the round, nasal As: Chic-ah-go.
Since her arrival in the country, Sarala had replaced her wardrobe of saris with jogging suits and seasonal and holiday-themed sweaters she ordered from QVC.
The wooden box of her mother’s recipes had been pushed farther and farther back into the cupboard, behind her collection of Tupperware, and had been replaced with new cookbooks recommended by Carol and the neighbor ladies Sarala now power-walked with each morning, doing laps around the mall before the stores opened—Betty Crocker, the Good Housekeeping All-American Cookbook, Microwave Cooking Made Easy.
“I thought you might enjoy reading this,” Carol had said that morning over coffee, presenting Sarala with her prized (and autographed, she pointed out, indicating the flourishing signature across the title page) copy of Mary Kay Ash’s biography.
Sarala had begun reading as soon as she got home. It pleased her to note the character traits they both shared: tenacity, commitment, enthusiasm, fortitude.
Alone in the house, Abhijat off at work, Meena off at Lily’s, Sarala kept right on reading through the long, quiet afternoon until it was time to begin preparing dinner, and then she propped the book up in a cookbook holder, reading as she stirred the pot simmering on the stove, a new recipe she was trying out called Yankee Noodle Dandy.
Outside, the sun had gone down. Meena would return soon from Lily’s house, Abhijat from the Lab. From the kitchen window, Sarala could see Carol across the street as she emerged from her house, two smart carrying cases in each hand. These she loaded into the trunk of her pink Cadillac and, checking her lipstick in the rearview mirror, backed out of the garage and down the driveway. Sarala wondered where Carol was heading, red brake lights glowing for a moment as she stopped, just barely, for the stop sign in front of the elementary school, then rolled through the intersection and off into the night.
Sarala, who so keenly noticed so many things about the world, had, it must be said, a bit of a blind spot when it came to perceiving Abhijat’s less-than-enthusiastic responses to the cuisine she presented him with each evening at dinner. She thought of the meals she prepared as a way to help Abhijat assimilate, to feel more at home in their adopted country. But Abhijat missed the food of his childhood.
Some nights, after growing hungry, picking at the American dinners Sarala placed before him, Abhijat took down the wooden box of Sarala’s mother’s recipes from the shelf over the oven, pulling it out from behind the collection of Tupperware.
On these nights, he carried it furtively into his study and read through the recipes, fragile pieces of paper in her mother’s pencil-light handwriting.
For when you feel the pain of distance.
And her recipe for puran poli.
For when the problems of the world knock at the door, begging entry to your home.
Her recipe for kheer.
As he read through the recipes, his mouth watering, eyes tearing at the mention of ground red pepper, cloves, cardamom, ginger paste, and raw mango, he remembered peeking into the kitchen of his childhood home, where the women sat, bent low over pots, peeling vegetables and grinding spices.
He had begun to cook for himself late at ni
ght, after he had finished wrestling with his latest paper. He grated ginger root into a bowl, Sarala upstairs watching television, Meena asleep or reading under her comforter by flashlight. At night, as they slept, the smell of his cooking creeping into their dreams, where Sarala found herself returning again and again to the kitchen of her girlhood.
CHAPTER 10
Sex Ed for the Gifted and Talented
Frantz Fanon discusses a critical stage in the development of children socialized in Western culture, regardless of their race, in which racist stereotypes of the savage and the primitive are assimilated through the consumption of popular culture: comics, movies, cartoons, etc. These stereotypical images are often part of myths of colonial dominion (for example, cowboy defeats Indian, conquistador triumphs over Aztec Empire, colonial soldier conquers African chief, and so on). This dynamic also contains a sexual dimension, usually expressed as anxiety.
—COCO FUSCO, THE OTHER HISTORY OF INTERGULTURAL PERFORMANCE
1987
BY THE END OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, IT HAD BECOME CLEAR THAT where Meena and Lily belonged was not with the rest of the children, mingling with the general population, but as part of the new, experimental, Gifted and Talented program, and thus, when they began junior high, they were pulled from what began to be referred to as “the regular classes” and placed in what the school board had elected to call the Free Learning Zone.
The Free Learning Zone was populated with the brightest students from the four elementary schools that fed into Nicolet Junior High. The classroom was long and narrow, filled with round tables rather than desks, quiet corners furnished with pillows, and cozy chairs in which students might curl up and read when struck by a particularly driving curiosity. Here, the students’ studies were self-directed. Long, low bookshelves lined the walls beneath a wide bank of windows. Colorful posters and artwork hung from the ceiling, suspended by fishing wire, giving the impression of the pictures floating in the air. There were easels where students might paint, computers grouped around a large round table, a problem-solving center, a debate corner, and, near the door, a desk for Ms Lessing, always piled high with precariously stacked books and papers, pens and pencils rolling off onto the brightly colored carpet. Ms Lessing had wild, curly red hair held back each day with a series of colorful scarves that sometimes matched the rest of her outfit, but more usually did not.
Among the privileges of the Free Learning Zone was that students could leave the classroom and visit the school library whenever they liked, and Meena and Lily took advantage of this opportunity frequently, becoming intimately familiar with the library’s collection of books, newspapers, periodicals, and reference materials.
Meena loved the way she might wander down an aisle, running her fingers over the spines of the books and choose one at random, any number of worlds opening up before her. She didn’t, however, like to think of all the other small worlds left on the shelves. It induced in her a sense of panic, the thought that it might not actually be possible to read all of the books in the world.
She loved, too, the library’s numerous sets of encyclopedias—Britannica, Columbia, New Standard. In them, she looked up Bombay, tried to imagine her parents’ previous lives, tried to imagine herself there. Her mother had taken her back to India twice. Both times she had been too young to remember anything of the trip, of the country, aside from the grandmothers who doted on her, stuffing her with a parade of sweets. And both times, her father had been unable (or unwilling, Meena was never quite sure) to tear himself away from his work to join them.
She looked up the Lab, which was described just as her father described it, as “housing the world’s premier particle accelerator facility, currently the most important tool for the study of subatomic physics.” It seemed important that the place where her own father worked appeared in the encyclopedia. She felt a sort of pride by association.
There, in the school’s library, the Free Learning Zone students sometimes encountered students from the regular classes whose teachers had arranged a visit to the library for some project or other, and on these days Meena and Lily sometimes caught glimpses of their old elementary-school classmates. They regarded each other curiously across the library as though eyeing a wild animal.
What were the other kids learning, Lily wondered? She had no sense of what she might talk about with them, were they to meet on the playground for recess or, as Ms Lessing called it, expressive play. Had they done the unit on Cubism yet? Would they know what a fractal was? How far separated had they become, she wondered. Tom Hebert made it sound like the regular kids now spent most of their time learning to fix automobile engines and give haircuts. Erick Jarvis, whose glasses turned from regular glasses into sunglasses and back again whenever he went into or out of the building, and who had a brother who was still in the regular classes, reported that, according to his source, it was all just exactly the same as before.
Among the regular kids, though, there had, it seemed, cropped up a collection of apocryphal legends about what had become of the gifted and talented kids who had been disappeared from their classes. One said he had heard that the gifted kids were all aliens who’d been identified by the government and had been shut up in the Free Learning Zone to undergo a series of top-secret experiments.
Tom Hebert said his next-door neighbor believed the gifted kids had been identified as “Commie spies” and had been sent to the Free Learning Zone for deprogramming. But the other Free Learning Zone students gave this theory little attention, having felt for some time that Tom was not really one of them. They had heard that he’d had to beg his way into the Free Learning Zone, a series of increasingly shrill phone calls from his parents until the principal had finally relented, shaking his head and thinking, Fine, kid. It’s your funeral.
Regarding the regular classes, many of the Free Learning Zone students had begun to develop a barely concealed contempt. Although the term regular might be more commonly understood to suggest “that which is normal, standard, or expected,” among the Free Learning Zone students there could be no greater insult than to be thought of as regular. Why be regular, normal, standard, when one could be exceptional, gifted, advanced?
In February, just as the citizens of Nicolet were beginning to tire of the grey slush of winter, the students of the Free Learning Zone began a unit titled “Our Changing Bodies.”
Meena and Lily could tell this was going to be something different from the way Ms Lessing colored when she began the first lesson, her voice going a little breathy, as though hoping not to be overheard by anyone who might be passing just then in the hallway. Gone was the self-directed learning. Ms Lessing insisted that all of the Free Learning Zone students take seats facing her. Suddenly, Ms Lessing was using the chalkboard, overheads, slides even, and strangest of all, reading from the book. She grasped it as she spoke as though it were a life preserver, the only thing keeping her afloat.
Lily paid careful attention. Ovaries, she lettered in her notebook in her slow, deliberate handwriting. Testes. She avoided looking at any of the boys in the class as she wrote.
Meena had propped up her health textbook on her desk so that it appeared as though she was following along as Ms Lessing lectured. But inside the textbook, she had secreted away her latest obsession, which she had discovered at the Friends of the Nicolet Public Library’s used book sale the previous weekend and had been carrying around since then—a strange, yellowed old book called The Secret Museum of Mankind. Turning the pages, her eyes on the grainy images and their captions, it was this book she read as Ms Lessing lectured.
There were photos of scantily clad men, earlobes stretched around clay disks; bare-breasted women in skirts of grass, naked babies resting on their hips; a boy hunter wielding a spear. In the background, she could hear Ms Lessing reading aloud from the textbook.
“You may begin to notice changes in your body.”
But Meena’s eyes were on the grainy photographs of The Secret Museum. She was nearing the end of
the section titled “The Secret Album of Oceana,” in which the author noted, The shores are dotted with these careless children of nature, lightly clad.
From the front of the room, Ms Lessing had adopted what she hoped was a reassuring tone.
“These changes are part of what is called puberty.”
P-U-B-E-R-T-Y she spelled out carefully on the chalkboard in all capital letters.
Here, in a classroom that was a sea of white suburban faces, Meena pored over the images in The Secret Museum, all identified as “natives” or as “representative specimens of their race,” all of them dark-skinned, the images in the book and the lecture, going on in the background like a kind of soundtrack, becoming intimately connected as she half listened and half took in the photos and their captions. Kalinga girls are fond of this style in which the bodice ends early and the skirt begins late.
“Soon, you may find that you have developed body odor.”
Here, an image of young women, their faces marked with elaborate patterns of cuts and tattoos, a caption reading, Tribal marks deform their not-unpleasing faces.
“Your breasts will begin to develop, and at first, they may be tender.”
There were almost no instances in which the individuals in the photos were identified by their names, Meena noticed. Rather, they were stand-ins, “a Kalabit” or “a Dayak,” each group represented by a single photo and informative caption.
“These changes are caused by hormones,” Ms Lessing continued.
To Meena’s right, Lily was carefully taking notes, but Meena was transfixed by the picture before her, a young woman ornamented in an elaborate feathered headdress: This striking personage, upon whom you will find all the young men’s eyes, is among her tribeswomen, considered to be a rare beauty.
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