chapter 23

MIT and HarvardWe assembled near MIT for our walking tour. I knew it was a guided tour, but I wasn’t prepared for a backwards walking guide. ‘Hi, I’m Austen.’ A guy with a ponytail introduced himself and waving to us to follow him, crossed the road walking backwards. I was tempted to try it, but discretion prevailed over foolhardiness.Hearts in our mouths, we followed Austen, afraid he might knock into something or someone. But no, it appeared he had eyes behind his head too, for he never once broke his backward stride to check anything, all the while telling us about MIT.He showed us around the classrooms and lecture halls, now walking forward, and lead us into the largest of them all, that looked like a mini theatre. I asked VK if I could sit on a chair. Before he could say, ‘Don’t’, Austen, who had overheard me, said, ‘Sure, you can.’ And I did, gingerly, jumping up almost at once, as if I had committed a sacrilegious act. There was a huge blackboard too, and chalk powder near it. It seemed like an anachronism but the sight was heartening—it wasn’t all technology at MIT.Austen was well-informed and spoke clearly and knowledgably. At one point, early on, he told us that courses at MIT were known by numbers. All regulars knew which school conducted which course. He gave some examples and then mentioned that there was no course number thirteen.When he paused for questions at the end of that speech, VK asked, ‘If MIT does not have a course with the number 13, what hope is there for human rationality?’The question took Austen aback and he said nothing, maybe because a very tall, White senior citizen, turned to VK and said, in the tone one uses to a not particularly bright child, ‘You see, 13 is an unlucky number.’ Austen quickly moved on. ‘Not much hope for human rationality,’ I whispered to VK.We tipped him discreetly and headed for Harvard, after a quick bite of the chapatti and potato rolls in the car. The Harvard guide was Laura, a plump girl in a micro miniskirt. She was good too but not as confident of the facts as Austen had been. I quite liked her as she took us around, though I’m convinced the men must have found her skirt distracting. VK wasn’t so sure. ‘Stocky legs,’ was his comment.‘Uncle, careful. Body shaming not allowed,’ Arpitha whispered.‘It was a compliment,’ he grinned.Harvard wasn’t as well-manicured as MIT. The trees, the old-world charm of its red buildings, the general attractiveness of letting the grounds be, brought University College, Thiruvananthapuram, to my mind. Or, maybe I was plain nostalgic for my city. Laura took us around Harvard Yard, the oldest part of the picturesque campus, pointing out various buildings, the halls, the Memorial Church, the offices, the classrooms and departments.She had introduced herself as a psychology student. So, when she pointed out the psychology department, VK asked her if she had taken any courses by the famous Steven Pinker. No, she answered, while pointing to a distant window where Pinker had his office. Strangely, she was more enthusiastic about Daniel Gilbert, Pinker’s colleague in the same department.She took us to the statue of John Harvard, considered the founder of the university, though the monopoly of the title has been disputed. In fact, the statue had an interesting anecdote behind it. Since no one knew how the seventeenth century clergyman had looked, a student had served as the model for the sculptor, Chester French, who was also inspired by other portraits to produce the final effect of a wistful John Harvard on a chair, an open book on his lap and a few more under the chair. I thought he looked pensive, probably wondering why students and visitors kept rubbing his left shoe to keep it polished and gleaming. ‘Why not my right?’ he seemed to ask, sticking it out.Ah, we could have told him why. And had the superstition extended to include the other foot, he’d have been sporting a pair of well-polished shoes. Of course, Arpitha and I faithfully adhered to the Neils Bohr principle again with a quick rub of the left toe. I gave a surreptitious pat to the dull right, which was feeling left out, before catching up with VK who had stomped ahead in some disgust. We found many of our tour companions openly tip Laura. Her skirt had won many admirers, but, alas for Austen’s ponytail. We added our bit and bid her a happy goodbye.‘Where next?’ I asked Luckshmi.‘Lexington Common,’ she replied promptly. ‘You can’t come to this city and not visit it.’ If the host thinks so, then so be it.Once we got there, we understood why Luckshmi had insisted on a visit to the place. Lexington Common or Lexington Battle Green was where, on 19 April 1775, the first shots that triggered the American War of Independence were fired. Strolling around the spacious, sedate and attractively green public park, it was difficult to imagine that any war could have begun there. Apparently, Concord also found that difficult to believe, certain the shot fired at the Old North Bridge in Concord that afternoon was ‘the shot heard round the world’, as R.W. Emerson had put it, and was the actual origin of the revolutionary war. With both Lexington and Concord battling for the honour of hosting the inaugural battle, and celebrating 19 April as Lexington Day and Concord Day respectively, the date was diplomatically declared Patriots’ Day. I was secretly pleased to learn that such momentous debates, on which all of history hinges, took place in the U.S. too.The bounds of this national historic landmark park were dotted with several plaques, memorials and statues, notably those of Captain John Parker who led the small Lexington force in the skirmish, and the Minuteman. The Minuteman statue symbolically represented all the Minutemen who confronted the British forces, Minutemen being the name given to local colonists who were willing to take up arms at a minute’s notice. We also gazed with curiosity at the oldest war memorial—a granite obelisk, the Revolutionary Monument—that stood as a tribute to the first casualties of the war. I was glad they called the obelisk an obelisk and not a needle.After a quick look in at Cary Library, the local library in Lexington, which, like the other libraries in the U.S. left me drooling, we returned home. Amar called with the wonderful news that he had got an offer from Bed, Bath and Beyond. What lay beyond was a whole lot of formalities to go through before the job became his.Though Amar wasn’t with us, we celebrated with dinner at Holi Restaurant, run by a couple of impatient Indians. But the food was good and on returning, we finished our packing in a tick; the perk of living out of suitcases. We were all set for the next leg of our trip that would take us from the east coast of Boston across several states to California in the west. We were going to spend a week in San Jose.We had to take the early morning flight to San Jose via Chicago. The alarm, chosen the previous evening for its unignorable ringtone that mimicked the final gasps of a man being strangled, made me shoot out of bed at 3.30 next morning, hair on end, to find Luckshmi already up and making coffee for us, the sweetheart.Our goodbye to Luckshmi and Anil turned out to be a long goodbye as the Uber cab, scheduled to reach at 4.30, didn’t come on time. We spotted the car on Arpitha’s app about half an hour away from Luckshmi’s home. It was moving in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. With twenty minutes to go, it stopped abruptly. After that, it just refused to budge. We grew frantic. ‘Is there any way the app can make it start? Try,’ I appealed to Arpitha urgently.We began thinking of last-minute options when it appeared to move again. Soon it arrived, with a loud squealing of brakes. A merry woman at the wheel jumped out to help us with our bags. ‘Sorry,’ she grinned. ‘I had to take a-call-of-nature break. Will make up, don’t worry. Early flight? No problem; can take you there in a jiffy with my eyes closed.’‘Eyes closed?’ I was alarmed. What followed easily awarded her the top spot as our most interesting Uber driver in the U.S. She needed no encouragement to open up and talked as fast as she drove. She had a regular job as part of some government social security scheme that involved calling on aged citizens who were living alone. She needed a break and had taken a few days off to drive an Uber. She drove all night and would be back home when it was time to wake her kid and prepare her for school. Her husband was asleep and did not even know she was out driving.‘Is it safe? Driving all night?’ I asked. She knew how to look after herself, she said. ‘Once,’ she continued, with a hiccup, ‘I threw out a bunch of giggly, drunken girls at night and in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, their behaviour was unacceptable, hic.’ Uber had accepted her explanation.Keeping her promise, she drove with her eyes closed while we held on for dear life. Going dangerously close to a swanky SUV, she overtook it, explaining, ‘I have my techniques for getting through heavy traffic. Hic. Look for a rich person’s car, a fancy, gleaming affair, spot a little gap and flash past them. Rich guys are worried about their paintwork, and let you pass.’ She giggled.She giggled so much, VK commented later that the stop before she picked us up was probably not to dispel stuff from her body but to ingest some. Whatever it was, she got us to the airport on time all right. We pulled body and soul together, thanked her and raced to the lengthy queue at the security, dragging our bags behind. An official came around, checking tickets and directed us to another, much shorter, queue. Had they pulled out suspicious looking passengers and clubbed them together, I wondered, getting the heebie-jeebies once again. But it turned out to be the other way about—Arpitha found out that the special queue was to facilitate security for low-risk passengers. Aha, one look at us and they had decided we had water on our brains.Security went like a song, though Arpitha’s bottle of water created a minor hiccup. The three-and-a-half-hour flight to Chicago was on time and when we reached, I had to set my watch back by an hour. And once we reached San Jose, I had to set it back by a further two. Uff! The exasperating time zones of America. I am all for the one country, one time zone policy.Those people who argue for multiple time zones in India too ought to be sent to every nook and corner of the U.S. They will be cured of this desire forever.The gate to board the next flight to San Jose was pretty close and we were divided into groups for boarding. We were in group five, the last group. VK quipped that we were the low risk and low priority passengers. ‘Group five, you may please stay back. We are loaded to capacity.’ This flight was on time. California, here we come.