PIGEON
Synchronicity is a theme
science can’t explain. Mutual
appreciation brought us
no closer. More like
we showed each other what we’re
made of. The human brain,
three pounds soaking wet,
its attentions divided.
My attentions were divided.
Nevertheless, I saw what I saw.
KAREN SOLIE
But synchronization is a theme science can explain. From the Greek syn (same/common) and chronos (time), it is the adjustment of rhythms of self-sustained periodic oscillators that comes about due to their weak interactions. Sometimes it happens by external forcings, like in radio-controlled clocks, cardiac pacemakers, or circadian rhythms. But other times it happens by simply coupling two oscillators. Like when two seemingly independent pendulums start to move in phase. Or the simultaneous flashing of fireflies in trees at night, or a rhythmic applause in a large audience. Synchronization is often desirable, but sometimes it is not. Like the swaying of the London Millennium footbridge on its opening day, caused by the footsteps of the pedestrians, the small sideways vibrations. There is even something called oscillation death, where both systems approach a stable rest when coupled. Oscillation death has been studied in theory, but there are few, if any, examples in real life.
Maybe it was because of my limp that I tried to understand the world through asymmetry. Nothing was ever quite right. There was always something missing, room for more. It is true I drank cow’s milk from the communal bucket of Gully Kapataan Wali in Delhi. But I never thought that was the cause of my limp. It did not explain enough of the details, mainly: Why me? Neither was my limp the product of a deeply repressed conflict. I knew it was the work of a virus. And, if I had left things to their own devices—like the virus’s impact on my mind and not just my body—I would have been bound to a wheelchair for life. I took control. I willed myself to walk. No psychic apparatus could sufficiently measure my life. I needed other kinds of apparatuses. I needed physics. A certain kind of physics. All this is to say that I learned everything I could about spontaneous symmetry breaking. I would find this to occur everywhere I looked. In particle physics, in condensed matter physics, in general relativity, in ferromagnetics, and in superconductors. I found it in scientific metaphors too. Like the “Mexican Hat” potential. If you place a ball at the top of the peak, it can fall in all directions towards the trough rim with equal probability. But it will choose one direction and come to settle on a single stationary state, somewhere along the rim of the sombrero. And if the ball starts at the centre of peak, the outcome, where it will come to rest, is never predictable.
As I approached the new continent by plane, the Himalayan mountains were already permanently fixed in my consciousness, but the rest of my memories of India—the chaiwalla, the kitewalla, the rickshawwalla—began a slow retreat back into the deep sea of my unconscious. In December 1967, the year of Canada’s centennial, I slipped on the tarmac at the Montreal airport and did not even curse even though “bhenchod”—sister fucker—bubbled to the surface. I did not utter a single word out loud. This ensured I would not say the wrong thing, to upset the microcosmos as it was forming newly around me. I gazed deeply into the symmetrical six-pointed structure of each snowflake as it was still falling from the sky, as it landed on my bare hands. I realized then that my consciousness—like the five-hundred-million-year-old Himalayas, like the five hundred millions of snowflakes that still each managed to be different—was not singular. It was just as Edward Schrödinger, founding father of quantum physics, had written in What is Life?, which I had read in university: “…I”—am the person, if any, who controls the “motion of the atoms” according to the Laws of Nature. I am the person. I control my destiny. I suddenly recalled entire passages from his book, as if in this new grounding, India was there, just below the surface:
The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian Maja); the same illusion is produced in a gallery of mirrors, and in the same way Gaurisankar and Mt Everest turned out to be the same peak seen from different valleys.
I was landing in Montreal, named after Mont Royal, the triple-peaked hill found at the city’s heart, which the man sitting on the plane beside me strangely called a mountain. It was formed by the process of intrusion, magma from an ancient volcanic complex intruding into sedimentary rocks. Different aspects of this one thing. There would be several opportunities for symmetry breaking here, and it would happen so much more quickly, because my Canadian fate had a much smaller basin of attraction.
After I made it into the terminal and got my suitcase, I realized that the plane ticket, boarding pass, complimentary coffee, my life back in India, had formed the easiest part of my journey. The border patrol officer checked my documents and repeated the name in my passport, as if with each repeat it would reveal itself less and less nonsensical. You have a master’s degree in physics? You want to be a teacher? You have some friends here who will help you find a job? Yes, that’s right, I replied, though I knew no one. Good luck, he said, not looking at my body below the waist. Thank you, sir, I said, for I believed sincerely in luck, or chance, to take me to the good outcomes. A little bit of an off-centre start at the peak, leading to a more desired resting point. I’ll need it, I said. I had very few possessions to my name, and only a cloth coat on my back. Exiting the baggage claim area, I headed straight for the phone booth. Straight? If you traced my path along the ground, it may have been straight. Of course, my persistent wobbling attracted attention. It was past midnight. I did not have any change and asked the woman on the adjacent phone if I could borrow five cents. She answered in French and handed me the coin. I opened up the phone book to a random page and started at the top left. She then said a few more sentences, but I just smiled and pointed to my suitcase, the baggage tag indicating DEL. I ran my finger down the flimsy page looking for the first name that sounded Indian. There it was: Sood, R. I called up the stranger and explained my circumstances in about five sentences, in English. The man at the other end replied, in Hindi: Stay put, I’ll be there in half an hour. I lived with him and his wife for my first few days in Canada. I did not want to impose on these kind strangers for very long and left. I lied, saying I had found a place to rent.
I lived mostly on french fries and milk those first few months in Canada. The first time I ate meat was in the form of a Harvey’s hamburger. Mr. Raj Sood’s brother-in-law, Prem, took me. He ordered and paid for the both of us and carried the tray to the table, as if he thought I was unable to do these things myself. I drank the root beer, hesitantly, believing it was beer, another thing I had never tasted. After that I often slept in and skipped breakfast and then, at noon, would go and get a burger, fries, and a shake at Harvey’s. It totalled ninety-six cents. Back home in Delhi there was only roti, dhal, subji. No meat, no eggs. If a neighbour’s hen came into the house, we would have to wash the whole house. And of course, no alcohol, but that would change quickly too. I did what I could to adjust to the new life, for I was lonely. No chaiwalla, no kitewalla, no rickshawwalla. Only root beers, falling leaves, and buses. I resisted meat for months, but finally gave in. It was too good.
I ended up sleeping on a bench at the Atwater subway station for a few nights after leaving Sood’s home. No one seemed to mind. One morning, at around ten A.M., a sardar approached me, asking me who I was, what I was doing there, and teasing me about sleeping on the bench. After a few minutes, another Indian fellow came out of a barber shop. He was on crutches, a broken leg. “Preet!” the sardar called and introduced me to him. It felt good to speak Punjabi. It felt good to let a few curses out about the weather that the Canadians were always too polite about. Panchod tandi! Sister-fucking cold! They asked me where I lived. I said I had taken a room in a house but did not know how to pay the rent. They called a taxi and took me to their apartment. It was a one-bedroom apartment and three other men were already living there. Live here, they said. They cooked curry chicken in huge pots and roti in frying pans and taught me how to drink, first beer, and then whiskey. With the beer, I found I became a much better walker. With the whiskey, I fell down a lot. One morning, at four A.M., the sardar and I went out. It was minus-twenty degrees Celsius and the streets were piled with snow. We were going to the temp agency to look for work. I was sent to a warehouse at seven A.M. The supervisor asked me to arrange some boxes into a pile. They were not that heavy, maybe five or six pounds each. After two hours, he came back and looked at my work. He said I should have used my brain. I had apparently not piled them correctly. I told him that if he had wanted me to use my brain he would need to pay me much more than $1.75 an hour. I was fired on the spot. I swore out loud, really badly, but in Punjabi. I never did ask what was in the boxes. My naïveté had eliminated fear, and for some things it had also eliminated curiosity. But then again, I had not come to Canada to pile up boxes, unless the problem involved solving some kind of novel geometry. I left the company of those Indian guys.
I would go to the McGill University campus now and then, to inquire about academic positions. By then it was February 1968. I carried with me a manila envelope with photocopies of all my education certificates. No one would even meet with me, acknowledge my presence. One day, a secretary who recognized me from my previous visits told me to try Sir George Williams University just down the road. They are much more lenient with people like you, she said. They take all kinds. McGill still had quotas for immigrant students, including Asians, Blacks, and Jews. Later that day, I left copies of my degrees with the main office of Sir George Williams on de Maisonneuve Boulevard. I was told to come back the next day to see a Dr. Sharma. I returned first thing in the morning. The office door was closed, but that did not stop me from knocking. Dr. Sharma was seated behind a desk, the entire right wall filled with books, the entire left wall a chalkboard. I introduced myself in about five sentences, in Hindi. So, you want to do a Ph.D.? Yes, sir. So, what then, you got third class in your M.Sc.? No, sir, I got first class. From Delhi University? Yes, sir. What are you doing here, this is a third-rate university! You should go to McGill! I tried, sir. Okay, join these two courses here, and we will give you an equivalent M.Sc. when you are done. What about the fees, sir? He picked up the phone and asked his graduate students if they needed any help in lab instruction. Yes. A couple of days a week, four hours a day, six dollars an hour. That totalled forty-eight dollars per week. I had won the lottery. It was enough to pay for rent and for everything.
The two courses I had to take were Quantum Mechanics III and Solid State Physics. Dr. Sharma taught the quantum mechanics course himself. One day the lecture was on neutron scattering. Dr. Sharma had started to review the relationship between the particle and wave viewpoints, and how neither were correct. The neutron behaves like a particle when created and like waves when scattered, and then like a particle again when detected. He explained that the probability of finding a particle is proportional to the absolute square of the amplitude, but that the amplitude itself varies with position and time. He explained that the neutron interacts with matter in two ways: strong nuclear forces with nuclei and dipole-dipole coupling with magnetic moments. He had started to write down the equations for the complex plane wave of nuclear neutron scattering from a single fixed atom when he stopped. He was stuck, right in the middle of the class period, right in the middle of the board, right in the middle of the equation. Let us continue tomorrow, he said. I asked if I could try.
I limped to the front of the classroom, took the white chalk, and began to complete the equations, matching my handwriting as close as possible to Dr. Sharma’s. Dr. Sharma called me into his office after class. You know all this? He asked me a couple more questions. Can one measure elastic scattering from a liquid? What is incoherent scattering? Bragg diffraction? Time-of-Flight? Larmor precession? I answered them all. He told me to not bother coming to class anymore, and said I got an A.
Things felt strained after that with Dr. Sharma. I applied to do a Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Two weeks later, I got a letter. I was admitted with a $3,700-a-year scholarship. Not just the lottery, but the jackpot. No coursework required. But I did not go. Why? Maybe the Rocky Mountains intimidated me. The ball just settled on a “no.” I tossed a coin and it was tails. There was a job being advertised by the Catholic school board. One of their physics teachers was sick. The principal was a Father. There was a box on the job application form for “Religion.” I filled out everything except that box. The Father gave it back to me and said I forgot to complete one part. “Sir, do you want me to indicate the one I was born in or the one I believe in?” I asked, laughing. “I need a teacher so badly, just write ‘Catholic,’ ” he said. “Sir, I have signed the application, why don’t you just add my religion?” He would not do it. Instead, he became a friend. Then, at the end of February, I saw an ad in the paper for high school teachers in the Eastern Townships, about a one-hour bus ride from Montreal. Dr. Sharma encouraged me to apply. It is a good job, he said. You will have a hard time making money here. I applied by collect call, which the school board accepted. The principal of the school said to meet him in the lounge of a certain hotel. I did not know what “lounge” meant. I did not have any nice clothes. Only the one Nehru jacket. Mr. Sood took me to Eaton’s to buy a suit. It cost ninety-five dollars. It had to be altered because of my leg. Sood came to my rented room, measured my legs, and cut and hemmed the pants right there. I found out that the job was only for two months. I was supposed to teach math, chemistry, and physics for grade eleven, but all they wanted to check was whether I could speak English. They had arranged a room with a family in a village, Lennoxville, a half an hour drive from the school. Two ladies who taught in the same school gave me a ride. One of them was named Pat and was very pretty. I could have hooked up with her, but at the end of May the contract was over, and I came back to Montreal. With nowhere else to go, I started back at the lab with Dr. Sharma.
My lab demonstration hours were in the evenings from six to eleven, so I often stayed at the university over the dinner hour. One day in the cafeteria, I saw an Indian fellow, all suited and booted. There were not many Indians at the university at that time. In fact, there were not many non-whites, even though the university had started letting in more Asians and Blacks. I got my french fries and milk and sat down at his table. Without a word, he lifted his tray and went to sit at another table. One day there was no space available at other tables, so he sat down beside me. He must have been in his thirties, a bit older than me. I asked if he worked at the university. He looked offended. He said he was taking courses. I wanted to make him feel good, to boost his ego, so I told him I was the dishwasher. The following week, I was sitting in my office, and the cafeteria fellow came to the door. He was taking some physics course and wanted to see the instructor. Maybe I can help you? I am the instructor tonight. He looked like you could cut him and there would be no blood in him. That white. He took it upon himself to find out where I lived. At nine A.M. the next day he showed up at my rooming house. I learned that his name was Chakraborty. He had been a pilot in India and was trying to upgrade his qualifications. He called me “Sir” thereafter. Please come to my house, he said. His wife made a feast of Bengali food and told me to return for meals every weekend and also bring my clothes to be washed. I thought, This is what it must be like to have a wife in Canada.
My lab demonstration job was for first-year physics students with experiments. They were measuring Newton’s rings (formed when light reflects from a flat surface), doing diffraction interference and electricity. By then things had changed a lot at the university. I did not have any Black students in my physics labs, but I did hear the rumours from some of the Indian students. They said Professor P.K. Menon from biology was put on the hearing committee set up by the university without even asking him. They just needed more colour on the committee. A colour other than black. The committee was set up because Professor Perry Anderson, from Menon’s very own biology department, had been accused of racism by a group of Black students. The professor called all the white students by their first names and all the Black students using Miss and Mr. and their surnames only. The students were also complaining about unfair grading. But, after a long and drawn-out investigation, Professor Anderson was exonerated of the accusations. I never met him, but from everything I heard I concluded that it was nearly impossible to prove racism. Maybe it was because of the way the mathematician Weyl described symmetry: something is symmetrical if there is something you can do to it, so that after you do it, it looks the same as it did before. But did not everything change whether or not you did something to it? Like my bad luck? I guess those students just looked black no matter what injustices people did to them. The physicist Richard Feynman argued that friction can make time irreversible, and that this irreversibility is caused by “the general accidents of life.” This makes things “lopsided in time.” It says something different about the past than the future. So, all that friction would put into motion a powerful trajectory that would end with the Sir George Williams Riot on January 29, 1969. Hundreds of mostly Black students would occupy the new central computer room. Thousands of white computer cards would be thrown out of its ninth-floor windows, falling like snowflakes, each encoding the registration of a single student in a single course.
As the tensions between the Black students and the university got stronger and stronger, I realized I needed to find a permanent job. Part-time TA’ing was not going anywhere. I quit graduate school and, in December 1968, answered an ad in the Globe and Mail for a high school teaching position in the town of Geraldton. I needed to go to Toronto, to the Hyatt Regency Hotel, for the interview. At that time, Dr. Kumra was in Toronto, at the university, doing a post-doc in the physics department. He had been a professor at Hansraj College in Delhi where I had been a student. I wrote him a letter. I spelled his name wrong, but he still replied. He picked me up at Union Station and took me directly to the interview. We talked about physics the whole way and then he said good luck. At end of the interview with the high school principal, as I was limping out of the hotel, I turned back and said, “Sir, I know you are not going to hire me for a permanent position, because you see I have a limp and are afraid students may make fun of me.” He said he had a teacher in his school who was in a wheelchair, as if that was proof of something, and it did encourage me. But then I thought, Why would a disabled person be hired to teach in Canada? Didn’t they have enough abled people? A week later he called. Mr. Anand? Are you still available? I did not understand the phrase and asked him to repeat himself. Are you able to accept the job? Yes, sir, I am able! By then it was December. I had no idea where Geraldton was, even though I had said I did in the interview. My wife in India, whom I had not seen and barely talked to since I left Delhi for Montreal a year before, would arrive in two weeks. We would finally become coupled in space, not just in time.