In his Messenger Lecture “The Character of Physical Law,” delivered in 1964, Richard Feynman says that you can drop a cup and let it break; then, if you wait long enough, its pieces will come back together and the cup will eventually return, whole, to your hand. His students laugh. Feynman hears the laughter. He knows what it means: “This ain’t gonna happen in the real world.” But space-time is a funny thing, Feynman explains. It makes experiences inside us completely different in the past and in the future. We remember the past. We cannot remember the future. The psychology is different. That is why it is so hard. That is why we speak of the past in terms of likelihoods. Because that is really all memory is: what likely must have happened. In all the laws of physics Feynman knows to exist, in 1964, there is no distinction between the past and the future. The law of gravitation is time-reversible: it looks the same in the future as in the past. The laws of electricity and magnetism? Time-reversible. Same for the laws of nuclear interaction. The laws of beta decay? Reversible. Most ordinary phenomena, he explains, are time-reversible. Therefore, physicists should not laugh when they see things going backwards. Unless they themselves are out of the ordinary, unless they themselves are going against the grain. Friction is one thing, he explains, that prevents time from reversing its direction.
Geraldton. I say the name as though I know what it means. As though it is an object or a scientist plucked from my physics textbooks. It enters my vocabulary just like that, along with the names of undetectable subatomic particles. In fact, the name is made up. It is the combination of the surnames of two mining entrepreneurs, J.S. FitzGerald and Joseph Errington. Between its establishment in 1935 and just before we arrive in January 1969, the Geraldton Mining Camp has produced three million ounces of gold. I tell my newlywed this fact, believing it will reassure her about Canada. I leave out the part about the bust. The price of gold has plateaued. It does not make business sense to continue mining, so the mines have shut down. If she finds out, I will argue that one person’s loss is another person’s gain, using some continuity equation to prove my point. She admires my intellect. I know she does. She will never leave me as long as I can speak in equations.
We care about gold more than most people around us, because we are Indian. When people left their homes during Partition, it was the common denominator in their inner pockets. The value of gold in India goes beyond economics, beyond material value. It is heritage itself, fashioned into complex jewellery to be passed on across the generations, the way beauty and symmetry find a way of surviving the most devastating of circumstances. That’s the gold standard for us. My wife insists we buy some right away, for our future children’s weddings, but I have no money, she knows that. We rent a trailer home a stone’s throw from the high school. I show her how to use the stove, how to lock the door, how to use the phone, and how to count the denominations of Canadian money, pointing out the difference between beavers and caribou on the nickels and quarters. She can read, but her writing is not great. She gets most of her information from the Times Star. Mostly she scans the issue for the price of rice or milk, oranges or orange pekoe. Thursday, February 20, 1969. My wife sees that two pounds of Texas green cabbage can be had for twenty-five cents and tells me she will make subji with it. The mines have closed but the Ontario mines minister announces mineral exploration classes to be given in Toronto. The basic course is free and the advanced course costs five dollars. The latter includes geophysics and geochemistry, missing from the basic course that focuses on claim staking and the history of mine finding. She reminds me how valuable my knowledge of science is. The Graduate is playing at the Strand Theatre, which we never go to as a couple.
I work at Geraldton Composite High School, teaching grade twelve chemistry and grade eleven math. The students talk about me behind my back and give me a hard time in class. I cannot tell if it is because I am Indian or because of my limp, or simply because I use words they have never heard before, like derivative and electromagnetism. They come from either mining or logging families. They seem to have little need for or interest in chemistry or math. But I explain how mining is really just chemistry and logging is really just math. Some of them get it. Then I tell them logging is chemistry and mining is math. And I eventually get through to everyone that way, but they still mimic my limp in the hallways. Doug Holland is the principal, “Mr. Holland” to me, and not an atom moves in the school without his permission. His are the laws everyone obeys. Even the teachers all drink tea in simultaneity every day at precisely 10:30 A.M. There is chatter about the latest films, the Canadian Legion dance, ski races. One teacher speaks dreamily of the actress Elke Summer playing Paula Schulz: “The man who marries me not only gets a champion athlete, but a champion cook.” I laugh and say, “Yes, yes.” I can sense the friction among the teachers, between the teachers and the students, but I feel I am the only one who feels it. I think of my wife, who has no desire to go to the movies, let alone become any kind of champion. I befriend a teacher, Wes, who is a hunter. Every time we go to his house we eat moose meat. He is a simple man. I tell him funny stories about back home. Like when I write a letter to Chacha, my neighbour, about how cold it is here. They have no concept of minus forty degrees Celsius there. I tell him that at night I wear an electric blanket. He is wonderstruck. He writes back: “If the electricity fails at night, how would you take the blanket off?”
Our first-born arrives in late January, 1970, at 11:42 P.M. It is minus thirty-one degrees Celsius outside, minus forty-one with the wind chill. The hospital is only minutes from where we live, a small facility built only seven years ago. They take my wife away in a wheelchair, something I have decided I never want to sit in. It scares me to see that contraption. I get a coffee and sit in the waiting room, which has a large window. It is snowing now, the flakes illuminated by the street lamps, but no, the meteorologists report the presence of ice crystals, tiny sparkles like diamonds, suspended in the night air. They are unusually symmetric objects because they are formed by the deposit of water vapour onto the forming ice crystal. Depending on humidity or temperature, they can take on different shapes—columns, needles, plates, or dendrites. If a crystal migrates to a region with different environmental conditions, the growth patterns may change again, and the final crystal is a product of mixed patterns. I try to imagine the face of my child in this new environment, or in any environment, but it is impossible.
The first thing I ask the doctor when he comes out of the delivery room is whether the baby has all the right number of limbs and digits. I know polio cannot be passed to a child during childbirth, but still I cannot imagine him that perfect. But he is perfect. I name him Bharat—the original Sanskrit name for India, the name suggested by my mother in India—and buy two ounces of gold the next day. My wife hides it under our mattress, says she will have a gold chain made for his wedding day. Dr. Wardle, I never learn his first name, is the only doctor in Geraldton. He becomes our family doctor. One day, a few weeks after the birth, he calls me at school. The secretary comes to get me from my class. Mohan, I have to talk to you, can you come down to my office? I worry he has found something in my son’s blood. The hospital is practically across the street from the high school. I go directly after school. I ask, “Is something wrong with Nirmal?” It is because of all the time in the hospital that I get used to calling my wife by her first name. That is not it. He says he has been trying to understand the formation of tides and how they relate to the moon. He pulls out a textbook from his drawer. I explain everything in fifteen minutes—including Newton’s law of gravitation, Kepler’s three laws, and centrifugal force—with just a few circles, dots, and arrows. I give him the equations. Then, picking up a cup and saucer from his desk, I improvise a demonstration of the moon’s elliptical orbit around the earth. He does not tell me why he wants to know. But it dawns on me that the interdependent movements of earth and moon and tides are somehow like those of my life, my family’s life, in relation to those of Dr. Wardle. He is our moon.
The prospect of teaching in a “college” exerts an attraction that moves me and my family to Thunder Bay in September of 1970. Here is how it happened. The Ministry of Education office was in Thunder Bay. One of the inspectors from there would go around to the neighbouring communities and one day came to my class in Geraldton. Afterward I bought a bottle of whiskey and invited him for a drink. He drank too much. I thought that was a good sign. Casey Geralds was his name, but it was not related to the place Geraldton. That year, the school board sent me to summer school to get a proper teaching certificate. Casey was the science instructor. One assignment was to prepare a question paper for grade nine students. The other teachers protested that coming up with six or seven questions was too much work. So, we were each asked to come up with only one question. Casey thought this would be even harder. I offered a four-part question: 1. State Boyle’s law. 2. If the pressure of a gas is increased three times, what will happen to the volume? 3. Here are three graphs. Which of these best describes Boyle’s law? 4. When we blow up a balloon, both the pressure and the volume increase. Does this contradict Boyle’s law? Casey was very impressed. In June there was an ad in the paper. Confederation College in Thunder Bay was hiring. It required a reference. I phoned Casey. But I got a call one day from the college saying that they still needed a reference. I went to Thunder Bay, to Casey’s office at the ministry. I waited one and half hours for him to return. Finally, I left a note: “Dear Casey, I was here. You were supposed to phone Gary Polansky at this number. I was really counting on this. One has to count on someone. I was counting on you.” He called the same day.
We ring in the new year with a potluck and Sikhs and Hindus and Muslims, who have also found themselves in Thunder Bay after leaving India. The Lambas, the Jaffreys. The Agarwals.
The only way to identify folded structures and shear zones in areas covered by overburden is by laying down magnetometers and electromagnetic sensors all across the surface in a comprehensive survey. Blind drilling is okay, but it will not detect all the possibilities. This is how major folded geological structures are missed. It is the major fault systems that give rise to gold camps.