Hanuman smiled at him, pleading, “Please continue with the story, honorable father.”
“Vali had been gone for a year. Ravan and other enemies were looking for an opportunity to avenge their humiliation at the hands of Vali and destroy Kishkindha. The ministers decided to crown Sugriv as king for clarity of command. But, Vali returned after pushing away the boulder that Sugriv had placed over the hole. Vali was furious that his weak brother had tried to kill him and take over his kingdom by deceit. He tried to kill Sugriv, but somehow Sugriv escaped to the Rishyamukha hills.
Vali dared not go to those hills. A Rishi, who had developed incredible weapons in his ashram—a hermitage that also served as a laboratory—lived there. He did not like Vali’s arrogance, and because of that, there was bad blood between them. The Rishi warned Vali to stay away or be killed.
Sugriv would be safe there. Vali had often mistreated him, had taken away his wealth, and even his wife. These actions were not befitting of a king and a brother,” Kesari said, concluding his story.
Hanuman agreed with his father. Sugriv was a brave and fair person. Vali was immoral and unjust to his brother. Justice had to be delivered to him. Hanuman touched his father’s scars from the battle. He had goose bumps. He was fascinated by the Rishis—their technology, knowledge of astronomy, intellect, mantra-hymns, and their fantastic talk of other worlds. He wanted to learn everything, but first, he wanted to be a great warrior like his father.
Kesari’s scars and stories were shaping the world views and ambitions of the chiranjiv, the immortal one.
Chapter 2
The Fog
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Modern Day California
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Battles are fought both inside and outside.
It was past 2 am. One of the rising stars of theoretical physics and mathematics, Krishnanujam, was getting some sleep after another long day at the lab. Krish was a good-looking young man. He liked to work out in the gym as much as he could. At six feet tall, clean-shaven, with black hair, thin rimless glasses, and a serious looking face, he appeared every bit a scientist. His lively eyes reflected an energetic and active mind. He was a gold medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiad and a chess champion.
Krish woke up violently from a deep sleep. “What the hell?” he yelled. He was in a cold sweat—his heart trying to pound its way out of his chest. He kept his eyes shut tightly and covered his ears with moist palms. “What’s going on?”’ he wondered.
After what seemed like an eternity—but was only a few seconds in Earth time—Krish opened his eyes and squinted around the room cautiously. His lamp came into focus, as if it was in the process of being created. He glanced at his analog watch, noticing the jerky movement of the second hand. In reality, it was moving smoothly.
“This never ceases to surprise me,” he muttered. He reached for his glasses. He could have sworn that he’d left them on the nightstand before he fell asleep. His hands fumbled blindly in the dimly lit room, but they were not within reach.
Ugh, my brain hurts, he thought rubbing his temples. Maybe I’ve just been working too hard and don’t remember where I actually left them.
For a moment, he reminisced on times when he wasn’t so busy. He mentally travelled to stage plays in the Humanities department at Cal Tech. He would notice small changes in the stage settings from show to show. Glasses would never be in the same place!
Who would move my glasses, I live alone! he thought.
He slowly planted his feet on the floor of his bedroom, touching the floor lightly first to make sure it was there. It was probably a smart thing to do given how his night was going so far. He slowly got to his feet, grabbing his glasses from the desk in the corner of his room. He walked to the window of his two-story rental house in Pasadena.
It was a chilly January morning. The central heating was blowing air through the vents—the whooshing sound was all that broke the silence. He felt slightly better, as if he had some company. It was a full moon that night. He scanned the sky and the streets below. Everything was very still, almost as if he was being challenged to figure out the secrets of the night sky. “Universe’s poker face,” he murmured. It seemed unreal, like a scene from a movie. The stillness of the moment was cracked suddenly by a large Post-it note falling from the wall. He was startled. He tried smiling at the eerie sensation he was experiencing. He put the Post-it note back on the wall.
Usually, Krish was calm and composed. However, tonight he was off his game. He walked down the stairs because he couldn’t see the moon from his northeast facing bedroom window. He remembered the lunar eclipse that was due to occur that night and hoped he hadn’t missed it. He tried to look for the moon from the backyard, but to no avail.
“Where has the moon gone?” he said. Finally, he saw it from one of the windows over the stairs. “Wow… look at that,” he said. It was awe inspiring. The moon was partially—and then fully—covered by Earth’s shadow. For some reason, the sight made him pensive. It authenticated the loneliness of his heart. He had written equations describing the universe with events separated by billions of light years. And here he was, face-to-face with a mere light-second distance. Krish found himself awe struck.
“Good reality check for the theoretician,” he said under his breath. The vast distances, the big shadows cast by heavenly objects, made him feel small, isolated, lost, and lonely.
Suddenly, he saw a being come out of a big black hole in the middle of the shadowed street.
Oh shit… I’m going completely crazy, or did I just imagine it, he thought. He focused back on the eclipse unfolding in front of his eyes. Is anybody else watching this or is the whole show just for me? He closed his eyes tightly, then opened them again. The moon was still hanging in the sky. Oh, thank goodness.
The floor was hard and cold. He put on his slippers and a sweater. Warming up some water, Krish made himself a cup of tea. He sat on the couch in the living room. The aroma of the masala chai reminded him of home. The smells of spices cooking, mouthwatering street food, rush hour train rides, and the beautiful freshman, Prisha, at Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) paraded through his mind.
As her name implies, she’s one lustrous, gifted lady, he smiled to himself. Thoughts of her pretty face, long hair, and—what he could only imagine to be—soft skin took him to a happy place in his mind. The pursuit of the dry material universe, and the math that subtly controls it was invigorating, but felt empty without loved ones.
Krish delved further into time spent with Prisha. He remembered the day he had trained her in the use of a scanning electron microscope to observe nanometer scale objects for her research. During the training, he said, “After sample preparation, you load it in the chamber, apply vacuum, adjust the voltage, and obtain images at the desired magnification. You can also get an idea about the composition of the sample with its spatial distribution.” Krish looked at her, hoping that she would be impressed with his knowledge and technique. She looked lovely in the white lab coat and the white hair net she wore. She shook her head gently, unimpressed.
“I see, but the software interface on this machine sucks. It’s too cluttered. The instrument could also be designed better. It should send the electron microscopy images and composition information and combine it with optical images obtained on the microscope upstairs to provide a thorough sample analysis, seamlessly.” It was Krish’s turn to be impressed.
“Very good ideas!”
Prisha shrugged her shoulders and said, “I want to start a company that provides a great user experience in the lab. I like the business side of things more.”
After that, they met in the cafeteria a few times for lunch. He particularly enjoyed their long walk to the cafeteria in the light drizzle of rain. They savored chai and poha together and rode on his motorbike around the neatly trimmed lawns and the beautiful campus overlooking the Sahyadri Mountains. Krish would be delighted when she rested her head gently on his shoulders during their bike
rides together.
Prisha would come to him with queries about difficult scientific concepts—which, of course, he was glad to help with. She shared her dreams of starting a company, making big money, then moving on to another exciting and profitable venture. Krish enjoyed their different perspectives—science vs. business.
Krish stretched his arms and drifted back to the present, away from home. I need to unwind a little this weekend, he thought. Opening his web browser, he decided to see what the rest of the world was up to. The news was not any different than it was the last time he’d checked.
‘18 Dead in Shooting Rampage, Women and Children Included’: he shuddered at the headline. He read about grisly beheadings and carpet bombings of civilian areas.
“People are trying to outdo each other with violence,” he observed sadly. Commentators summarized the state of affairs—with the theater of democracy hosting another rendition of elections, the rhetoric was sure to heat up again. Elsewhere, they didn’t need election seasons to spew venom.
He shook his head dejectedly at the reality that these were the leaders they had to rely on. He hoped the business section would offer some better news. On the contrary, he was only met with the news of layoffs, foreclosures, people dying due to inadequate insurance coverage, leaders trying to manage the messy global economy, and greedy people milking the system just as much as the lazy people.
Math and physics sound better, he reasoned taking a deep breath. Let me see who’s going to the Super Bowl, he thought, scrolling toward the Sports section.
“Holy crap!” he almost jumped out of his seat as he watched what was unfolding before him. He felt as if the furniture no longer existed. It was assembling from individual atoms right in front of his eyes. It was as if he had some special vision that allowed him to see the individual particles whizzing around in all possible directions, colliding with each other.
He suddenly remembered the van from 1975; the one he saw near Cal Tech. It displayed diagrams by a scientist, Feynman, to depict all possible histories to account for the way mass particles—fermions and force particles or bosons—interacted. This was a very important step toward understanding how our world works at an atomic level. As soon as Krish turned his gaze toward the chair, the particles assembled themselves as a chair. “What the hell!” he exclaimed.
He rushed to the mirror in the downstairs bathroom, examining his left, and then his right, eyeball. He couldn’t see his eyes moving, even when he undoubtedly knew they had moved. This was normal. All right, so my mind has not been completely lost. His heart was still racing by the time he came out of the bathroom. The physicist in him thought that he was observing some strange atomic-level quantum effect in a big object, such as the chair. His mind wandered in that direction.
At the very least, the macro world of gross objects should have been left alone to obey the very intuitive and logical laws of Newton, he thought with annoyance. He imagined the good old days, before the confusing and non-intuitive quantum theories that didn’t obey normal logic.
Nature does not determine the outcome of any event—even the simplest. All possibilities are probable. An electron can travel from here to the moon before it can travel from here to that chair, he tried to summarize some tenets of these strange theories, attempting to make sense of what was going on around him.
He continued, mechanically recalling concepts he had mastered as a prodigious high school student. Objects are attracted to each other by a force that depends on the distance between them at that time. But, time is relative and depends on the observer as per special relativity. Maxwell’s theory requires that time be constant in all frames of reference. Thus, time cannot be separated from three-dimensional space. Hence, the concept of space-time. And then, General Relativity describes that space-time is not flat, but curved, and distorted by the mass and energy in it. Objects move in geodesics—the shortest path on a curved surface. When space-time is not flat, the path of objects moving in space-time appears to be bent as if a force is acting on them. This is gravity. He skipped over a few details in his head. At an atomic scale, intuitive understating of the universe does not work. So, why am I seeing atomic level phenomena with my naked eyes? Am I hallucinating?
He badly wanted someone he could hold on to, to keep him anchored emotionally and physically in this space and time. He fell to his knees and started sobbing. Uninterrupted tears flowed without restraint. He couldn’t understand what he was experiencing or why.
Maybe I ate something bad… yeah that’s it! He wanted so badly to wrap his mind around his reality with a simpler explanation. He gazed out of the window, clouds were passing by the eclipsed moon, giving it an even eerier appearance.
Is this the first time I’m seeing this? How many eclipses have I witnessed? Thousands? Is this Deja vu? he wondered. Or is the vision of thousands of such events suddenly coming to me, quantum superposition? He was puzzled and shaken. Well…this is new terrain. His mind took a deep dive within.
“Math! Mock theta functions from Ramanujan’s lost notebook,” he exclaimed—that was the answer. Ramanujan was a great mathematician. Krish started scribbling feverishly on a piece of paper he’d found. Then, he began writing equations from the notebook. Mathematics was the place in his mind where he felt most comfortable and safe.
Krish heard faint tweets outside. He looked up, realizing that the sun was about to rise. He got up from his chair, went to the window, and bent down to stretch his back. He had been buried in his math for a few hours. It was his comfort zone and made him feel like himself again.
The sky changed from dark blue, to faint pink, to orange. Slowly, the world revealed itself. The cloak of darkness was cast away, and the world around Krish was bathed in light.
Suddenly, his eyes lit up with possibility. What if all the things he had felt last night were indicators of the true nature of the universe, beyond what the current state of physics thought possible? It was an intriguing thought. He knew he had to pursue it further.
He took a quick shower. Even though he had barely slept, he was not tired at all. He was energized by the possibilities that lay ahead of him. He walked briskly to his office at Cal Tech. To his surprise, quite a few researchers and students were on campus this early on a Sunday morning.
“I’m not the only one hit the by the eclipse, I guess,” he said as he passed by Professor Leonard Eagleman, whose hair looked unkempt. Leonard was from the marine biology department.
“You got that right, Krish. I’m studying some fish that were affected by the full moon and high tides yesterday,” Leonard said smiling.
Krish walked rapidly passed the engineering department and toward the physics department. He opened the door to his office, sat at his desk, and started writing down everything he had experienced the night prior.
If anyone reads this, they’re going to think I’ve lost it, he thought as he finished writing as much as he could remember.
Some time had passed. He shook his head to wake himself up as he realized he had slumped in his chair. The exhaustion was finally setting in.
He stopped by Ann’s Coffee Shop to grab a small drink and a snack. Olivia, the barista with bright eyes and a pleasant smile, was serving drinks that day.
“Here you go, Krish,” she said. Krish smiled back as he grabbed his coffee. The warm drink radiated comfort into his palms. He opened the cup to get a whiff of the latte, sipping his drink on the way home.
“Good morning, Mike,” he greeted his burly neighbor who was just getting back from a jog.
“Howdy,” Mike waved back. The mundane helped Krish stay grounded that morning.
Let me try to calm my mind with meditation, he thought once inside. Krish’s parents were religious-minded. He grew up listening to magical stories from the ancient past and Sanskrit language hymns. Maybe that’s why I imagined that being coming out of the road, just like the stories I heard of other worldly creatures! He was not particularly interested in mythological matters. He loved
science and math. He had seen his father do some breathing exercises sometimes. He wanted to quiet his mind, so he sat to meditate for some time. He tried to focus on his breathing, but was not able to for long. He was too tired and there was too much going on in his mind. This isn’t working. I need to share this with someone. It doesn’t make sense to e-mail Dave, unless I flesh it out more, Krish thought to himself.
David Phinney was his research advisor. Dave was well known in his field of theoretical astrophysics. He was very egoistic and brash. Pushing beyond the current state of the art, based on some strange experiences of the night before, Krish knew exactly what Dave would say, ‘Don’t waste my time on half-baked ideas.’ Dave brushed most of his students’ ideas off as not worthy of his time.
Someone like Krish—with half a dozen highly cited publications in top-notch journals that made big news, and getting ready to defend his dissertation in a few months, all before he even celebrated his twenty-second birthday—would be considered borderline genius by most. But not Dave, who himself was the recipient of the MacArthur genius grant when he was twenty-three. His ego was as large as the galaxies he studied.
It’s not too late to call Professor Neelkanth Tripathi, Krish thought as he calculated the time difference. Professor Tripathi, at IIT Bombay, had a lot of potential, but always thought of himself as an underachiever. He thought if he were at another famous university in the west, he would be well known. Krish used to discuss some ideas with him, as they were working in similar areas. There was a slight competitive heat between the two. Krish was not too worried about Neel developing his ideas first as, in recent years, Neel had focused more on applied physics and technology than theoretical physics. Funding pressure had forced Neel in that direction, but maybe that was why he jumped at any opportunity to discuss theoretical physics—his first love.
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