by Helen Dewitt
It was terribly, terribly hot. She lost three babies and they decided not to try for a while. Then she got pregnant again, and this time she was sent immediately to the hills. Various female members of the family offered to go with her, but her husband (fearing that the cooler climate might tempt her into the saddle) put his foot down. She was allowed to go on her own, and this time the child was born alive, but she was not well for a long time afterwards so she did not see much of it.
One of her brothers was growing coffee in Kenya. She had heard the climate was better there, and she asked one day if they could go to Kenya. She did not really think they could, because the family was all in Bombay and the business there took up so much time. Her husband walked up and down for a minute or so, and he said he thought it might be quite a good idea. He said he thought there would be opportunities in Kenya. He said it would mean starting over again, but all this fanaticism was not really his cup of tea.
They left Bombay when Sorabji was five, and his first memories were of the journey by ship to Mombasa.
He would wake late at night and his mother would be by the bed. In the gloom he would see only the glint of diamonds at her neck and ears, the white of her gloves; she would take him in her arms and carry him up to the deck where his father was waiting. She would hold him on the rail; below the pale foam melted into the dark water, above the stars were brilliant and close.
Sometimes some other passenger would come and protest that the child should be in bed. His mother would laugh and say that they might see a comet.
She would point out constellations while his father stood silently smoking. She explained that she had seen different stars as a child; she explained that the earth was like a ball in the air, and that if you were at one end of it you always looked out the same way.
His mother died of malaria when he was 12. His father sent him to a school in Britain.
The head of the school interviewed Sorabji, and he agreed to admit him to the school as a special favour, but he said he would have a lot of catching up to do. He said he was the most ignorant boy he had ever seen in his life.
The fact was that Sorabji knew a lot about mathematics and science and nothing else. He had been taught by correspondence course in Kenya, and as soon as the packet came in the post he would do all the mathematics and science and send it back, so that he made rapid progress in the subjects that interested him. He kept the arts papers in a pile on the floor to be done as time allowed. One day he thought he should do something about it because the pile was five feet high, but the early papers at the base of the pile had been eaten by ants, so he had given it up as a bad job.
He told the head that he knew quite a lot about science and mathematics, and the head said what this showed was that he was completely undisciplined. As he had covered most of the mathematics, biology, chemistry and physics of the O-level syllabus, however, those periods could be used to catch up on what he had missed.
Sorabji ran away from the school 27 times and was sent back each time.
The first time he ran away was at night. He looked up at the Northern sky; it was like going from a Bond Street jeweller to a street trader hawking chips of glass on cheap velvet. The moon was 240,000 miles away and that was far enough. The second time he ran away was just after dawn. He made his way along a canal to the next town and he saw an orange ball of flame shimmering through the trees and it was 93 million miles away. He made it all the way to his father’s house in London, but then he was sent back to the school. He kept running away and being sent back to the school and soon everything in the solar system was too close.
He was obsessed with distance. He had read of stars whose light had left them millions of years ago, and he had read that the light we see may come from stars now dead. He would look up and think that all the stars might now be dead; he thought that they were so far away there would be no way to know.
It was as if everything might really already be over.
One day he found a book on astronomy in the school library. Because he was interested in distance and the deaths of stars he turned first to a chapter on stellar evolution, and the book fell open on something called the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which used brightness and temperature to plot the evolution of stars. Sorabji had never seen anything so wonderful in his life. He had never imagined that a piece of knowledge so wonderful could exist in the universe.
He kept looking at the page thinking: Why have I never heard of this before? Why doesn’t everyone know about this? He sometimes said later how strange it was being at the school, knowing that no one had ever tried to give this glorious piece of information to the boys but instead forced them to spend hours turning perfectly good English poems into atrocious Latin ones. He said the frightening thing was thinking of how many other wonderful things there might be which were kept from them at the school. He had run away one last time and put himself in for A-levels independently and got the As and got into Cambridge, and he had never forgotten the things that were kept from people at school.
I thought suddenly Look. If Kambei had stopped recruiting when the first samurai didn’t work out a 205-minute masterpiece of modern cinema would have been over at minute 32. Five billion people on the planet, I’d tried one. And at least someone who’d run away from school 27 times would not leap to conclusions because I had left school at the age of six.
I was about to get excited and think This is it when I suddenly thought Wait just a minute.
I said to Sib: You know that story about the Ugandan from the Lango tribe
Sib said: Yes
I said: Is it actually true?
Sib said as far as she was aware
I said: But how do you know?
Sib said: Well there was an interview when Dr. Akii-Bua got an honorary degree from Oxford and he said he would not be there to tell the tale without the extraordinary heroism of Dr. Sorabji.
I said: And what about the volcano?
Sib said she had once read an interview of the man with the broken arm describing what it was like falling back into the volcano and then seeing Sorabji climb down inside the rim. She said: Why do you ask. I said I just wondered. I didn’t ask about Pete because I had seen Mathematics the Universal Language myself. Pete called Sorabji that maniac and that lunatic, but he never said Sorabji hadn’t saved his life.
All the evidence suggested that Sorabji was not only brilliant but a genuine hero. The question was whether I really had the nerve to go up to someone who was not only a hero but a scientific genius.
At first I thought I was not going to be able to do it. But then I thought if you’re a coward you deserve what you get. You deserve what you’ve got.
When I decided I was going to have to do it I realised I would have to be prepared. There was no point in going up to a Nobel Prize winner and saying the kind of thing that would make him think Sesame Street was about the right level.
The problem was that it was hard to know what would be enough. Finally I decided to do Fourier analysis and Laplace transforms and Lagrangians and I would also learn the periodic table because I had been meaning to do it for a long time and I would also learn the Lyman, Balmer, Paschen and Brackett hydrogen series because of Sorabji’s early interest in spectroscopy and maybe that would be enough.
It took about a month to get ready. It was not all that easy to work in the house because Sib kept interrupting to read out amusing extracts from the Magazine of the Parrot Society such as Factors Affecting Parrots, A. Human Interference. Or she would jump up and look at the book on Fourier analysis and say How fascinating. Finally I went over to the Barbican and worked there. At the end of the month I wondered whether I shouldn’t spend another month on it, or even a year. Wouldn’t it be worth an extra year to be in with a chance? A chance of having a Nobel Prize winner for a father, and not just any Nobel Prize winner either, but a Robert Donat lookalike who jumped off trains? If I got this right—I thought if I got this right it would be like jumping onto a moving tra
in, suddenly everything would be fast and easy and I would never look back.
I would have spent a year if I had known what to do, but I was not sure what to do, and I thought the more I did the older I would get and the less surprising it would be that I could do it.
I recited the periodic table one last time for good luck and I went out to look for Sorabji.
Sorabji had started out at the University of London and he still had some kind of affiliation even though he was now at Cambridge. He had kept his house in London when he got the appointment because the children were doing very well in their schools and it made sense for them to stay there. He had rooms in his college in Cambridge. He might be in Cambridge doing research or he might be in London because it was summer.
I took the Circle Line to South Kensington. I went to Imperial College and the woman in reception said there had been an unconfirmed sighting three weeks ago. I explained that I was doing an astronomy project over the summer for school and part of the project was supposed to be an interview with a famous astronomer and was there any chance I could interview Professor Sorabji? I said Please? I said couldn’t she let me have his home address so I could write to him there? I said Please?
She said Professor Sorabji was a very busy man.
I said: Please?
She said she couldn’t just give out his address to every Tom Dick and Harry.
I said I had been studying Fourier analysis every day for a month to surprise Professor Sorabji and Please?
She said: Fourier analysis! What’s that when it’s at home?
I said: Would you like to see me find the gravitational potential at any point outside a solid uniform sphere of radius a of mass m?
She said: Well—
I said: How about a problem with vibrating strings or membranes? Say a square drumhead or membrane has edges which are fixed and of unit length. If the drumhead is given an initial transverse displacement and then released, what is the subsequent motion?
She seemed to be wavering, so I snatched up a leaflet describing Imperial College and on the back hastily used the Legendre function to calculate the gravitational potential at any point outside a solid uniform sphere of radius a of mass m, and on a separate leaflet I began to calculate the subsequent motion of the drumhead but she said Oh all right. She wrote his address on a card. It was within walking distance.
I started walking to his house. I was getting more and more nervous. What if I had the chance of having a perfect father and blew it because I forgot the mass numbers of the three most abundant isotopes of hafnium?
I said: Hafnium. Symbol Hf. Atomic number 72. Relative atomic mass 178.49. Number of natural isotopes 6. Mass numbers of most abundant isotopes with percentage abundance 177, 18.6%, 178, 27.3%, 180, 35.1%. Most stable radioisotope (predominant type of decay) half-life, 181 (β –, γ) 42 d. First ionization energy 7.0 eV. Density in g/cm3 at 20°C 13.31. Melting point 2227°C. Electron configuration [Xe]4f 145d26s2. Oxidation state in compounds, IV. Atomic radius 156.4α pm. Covalent radius for single bonds 144 pm. Reduction potential w/ number electrons etc. etc. -1.505(4). Electronegativity 1.2. Terrestrial abundance: 4 · 10-4.
I knew what some of them meant. I thought I might as well learn them all at the same time. Now I realised I should have found out what reduction potential E° in V with number (n) of electrons was for, and I wished I had gone ahead and learned ionic radius in pm with oxidation number and coordination number. What if it turned out the one thing that had kept me from having Sorabji was not knowing the ionic radius with oxidation and coordination numbers? I was about to turn around and go home again but I thought that was stupid. It was just chemistry anyway so he probably wouldn’t care, and anyway there would always be some other thing.
I found the house and went to the door and knocked. A woman came to the door. She had brilliant black eyes and jet black hair. She was wearing a purple sari. She seemed forceful and decisive just opening the door and listening to my explanation about the school project and the interview.
She said: We’re having a guest for dinner, so I’m afraid my husband won’t be able to talk to you tonight. He may not be able to fit you in at all, you know, he’s terribly busy these days, still you may as well come in, no use letting the grass grow, if he can find a time you can fix it all up straight away. What is your name?
I said: Steve.
She said: Well come in Steve and we’ll see what we can do for you.
I followed her into the house. A television was on in a room to the left off the hall. She led me into a large room to the right.
A tall, thin, grey-haired man stood by the window looking into the street. He was holding a glass of sherry. He said he thought we were a long way from understanding that.
Sorabji said he thought the next few years would be critical. He was standing by the fireplace holding a glass of sherry. He began to talk about stellar winds, gesturing with his free hand and then putting down the glass of sherry to gesture with his other hand. The only thing I could understand was that he was talking about stellar winds. I’d never thought of reading about stellar winds. The other man said something which I also could not understand and Sorabji began to talk about Wolf-Rayet stars. A Wolf-Rayet star is a highly luminous star with broad emission bands in carbon or nitrogen. I could not understand what Sorabji was saying. I would have liked to say something brilliant but the only thing I could have said was that a Wolf-Rayet star is a highly luminous star with broad emission bands in carbon or nitrogen.
Sorabji was still talking impetuously though we were standing by the door. His skin was paler than a dark tan; his eyes were piercing and black; his hair was black and wavy. It did not seem impossible that I could get away with it. He would not decide I could not be his son on the basis of abysmal ignorance of stellar winds and the single scattering maximum and Wolf-Rayet stars, but I did not want to tell him and watch him think that Sesame Street was about the right level.
He was still talking impetuously when his wife interrupted without waiting for a good moment.
She said: GEORGE. This boy wants to talk to you. It’s for a school project. Can we find him a time?
He laughed. He said: Does it have to be in the next 18 months?
She said: GEORGE.
He said: I can’t think about it now, I’ve almost convinced this heretic of the error of his ways, isn’t that right Ken?
The man by the window gave a dry smile.
I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say that.
Sorabji began to talk impetuously again and she said: GEORGE.
He said: I’d have to check my diary. I daresay I can manage something. I’ll have a look later. Why don’t you stay for dinner?
I said: Thank you.
He said: Splendid, my wife will find you some problems to do—
His wife said GEORGE again but he said No, a rule’s a rule, and he explained that the rule was that if you finished a page of problems you got to eat with the grown-ups. He explained that his children had a page of problems to do every night. He said grinning: Don’t take it too seriously, will you? God knows the girls don’t, they’d far rather eat in front of the TV than sit listening to Ken and me talking nineteen to the dozen, if you find you can’t hack it you can stay and watch EastEnders and we’ll go through my diary later on.
His wife took me into the other room.
She said: George has this bee in his bonnet about mathematics, Steve.
I said it was all right.
The TV was on. Three girls were watching it and working on pages of problems. She introduced me and they looked up and then back at the TV. She said I could work on anything I thought I could do, and she said now she really must see about dinner.
The youngest girl was working on a page of problems in long division. I thought that they would take a long time to do, and what was the point? He was not going to think much of it if I brought in a page of long division. It wouldn’t matter whether it was right or not, it would be the
type of thing anyone could do.
The middle girl was working on a lot of equations in three variables. He was not going to think much of it if I just came in with solutions to three-variable equations, and they would take a long time to do.
The oldest girl was working on a page of determinants. It would be hard enough to be worth doing, but there were so many problems that it was going to take a long time.
I said to her: Are there any other problems I could do?
She said with a shrug: You can see if you can find anything in there.
She was pointing to a folder on the table. They all laughed. I said: What is it? And they said: Nothing.
I opened the folder and in it was a big pile of printed pages with problems on them. There were a lot of things I couldn’t do, but I could see there were some about Fourier analysis so I thought that would probably be all right.
At the top of each paper it said 3 hours. I said: When is dinner?
They said: He starts at 8:00.
It was 7:15. I thought I would just divide by three the number of problems you were supposed to do and then it would probably be all right if I went in at 8:15.
The problems on the pages were rather miscellaneous, whereas the girls were each doing all one kind of problem. So I got four problems about Fourier analysis off different pages. They were a bit more complicated than the ones in my book. It was about 8:30 by the time I finished.
I went into the dining room. He was sitting at the head of the table pouring out a glass of wine for the other man. He was saying
There’s absolutely no question, Ken, about the importance of this proposal— Yes, what is it?
I said I had finished my problems.
He said: Have you now?
I said: Do you want to check them?
He said: I’m afraid it’ll have to wait—
I said: Then you’ll have to take my word for it.
He laughed. He said: Firoza, would you mind setting another place?
His wife set a place for me, and she gave me a big serving of curry. She told me Dr. Miller had something quite important to discuss but her husband would go through his diary with me later. Sorabji kept talking impetuously and filling Dr. Miller’s glass with wine, and Dr. Miller kept saying To get back to what I was saying earlier. This went on for about two hours but the girls never came in with their problems.