Charmed Particles (13 page)

For both Lily and Meena, the highlight of the fourth grade was the unit introducing them to the methods and techniques of research, which Mrs. Webster had unimaginatively titled “Writing a Report.” The unit began with an introduction to note-taking. They practiced creating outlines and studied the importance of visual aids. From there, the students were to break into pairs to research and prepare a short written report and presentation. Mrs. Webster had handed out a long list of preselected topics from which they might choose:

Creatures of the Sea

Good Nutrition

Illinois

Kinds of Birds

The Heart

The History of the Bicycle

The Shrimp

The Invention of Baseball

The American Flag

Flowers

How Trees Grow

But Lily and Meena had begged to be allowed to choose a topic of their own, and Mrs. Webster had, after much pestering and critique of her assembled topic choices on their parts, reluctantly agreed. Lily and Meena selected the life and times of Lady Florence Baker, explorer of central Africa and co-discoverer, with her husband, of Lake Albert.

For a week, the class spent the Language Arts portion of the school day visiting the small library around which the school's classrooms had been organized. Mrs. Smedstadt, the librarian, introduced them to the large wooden card catalogs near the checkout desk and walked them through the complexities of the Dewey Decimal System. Lily and Meena loved leafing through the soft-edged manila cards of the card catalog. Together they assembled a list of books to gather:

916 Af The Great Explorers of Africa

917.704 Sp The Discovery of the Source of the Nile

910.82 Da Hints to Lady Travellers

917.76 Mi Baker of the Nile

916.76 Ha Lovers on the Nile

962.4 Ba Morning Star: Florence Baker's diary of the expedition to put down the slave trade on the Nile, 1870-1873

It was, perhaps, not surprising that Lily and Meena were the only fourth graders to request materials from another library. They had been distressed to find that their topic received scant coverage in their World Books, among the several-page spreads devoted to American presidents, state flowers, and breeds of dog.

Together Lily and Meena read through their stack of books and filled a neat pile of index cards, color-coded pink for biographical details, blue for historical context, green for information on their subject—Lady Florence Baker herself—white for information on her husband, and yellow for notes on other explorers who had been their contemporaries.

So, while the other students' index cards read like this:

Shrimp are a type of crustacean.

Shrimp are caught in nets.

There are many species of shrimp.

Shrimp eat plants.

Lily and Meena's looked like this:

Born Barbara Maria Szász in 1845 in Transylvania.

Kidnapped and sold into slavery at the age of four.

Raised as a harem girl in the home of a local merchant.

1859: put up for sale at a slave auction at the age of fourteen.

Two men bid for her. One—a servant of the pasha of Vidin. The other—Samuel Baker.

The pasha's servant places the highest bid, but Baker bribes Florence's attendant to allow him to take her. He and his friend, the Maharaja Duleep Singh (an Indian prince), escape with Florence.

1861: Samuel and Florence set out to discover the source of the Nile.

1865: Florence and Samuel Baker are married.

1866: Samuel knighted by Queen Victoria of England. The Queen refuses to receive Florence because of the scandal of Florence and Samuel traveling together unchaperoned before their marriage.

1916: Florence Baker dies.

Certainly Florence's marriage to Samuel had been an unconventional one, and it had pleased Lily to discover this, feeling a sudden kinship with the couple. Lily loved the task of copying out the relevant passages of text onto her crisp note cards, enclosing them carefully in quotation marks and noting the source at the bottom of each card. At night, at her desk, she ordered and reordered them, imagining the best approach to organizing their report and presentation. Meena argued that the only sensible approach to organization was chronological, but Lily had wondered whether they might not start first with a key event of Florence's adult life—being snubbed by Queen Victoria, perhaps—and then circle back through the biographical details chronologically, using the opening scene as a kind of bookend, as some of the more sophisticated biographies she had read tended to do. “Lady Florence Baker was born Barbara Maria Szász in 1845 in Transylvania.” Lily shook her head. She couldn't bear that type of inelegant introduction.

The assignment had been to produce a three-page report and a five-minute presentation, including one optional visual aid. For their oral presentation, Meena had created a posterboard timeline noting the key events in Florence's life, illustrated with photocopied pictures of Florence and Samuel and a map she had created, on which she had outlined the “Route of Florence and Samuel Baker's First Expedition, 1861-1865.”

Meena and Lily's report, “Lady Florence Baker: The Journey from Slavery to Exploration,” weighed in at twenty pages, not including endnotes, bibliography, and the following index, which Meena had carefully prepared:

Abduction

childhood and, 1-3, 5

Africa, 5-11, 13, 17

Albert Nyanza.
See
Lake Albert

Arabic

fluency in, 10

Baker, Sir Samuel White, 3, 4-9, 11, 13-17, 19

books by, 15, 17

knighthood of, 16

Blue Nile

origin of, 9-10

discovery of, 8

Bucharest, 3

Camels

bargaining for, 5

riding, 5-9

Cannibalism, 11, 15

Egypt

expedition to, 7-10

Gondokoro, 9-10

Harem

women in, 2

Florence's experience in, 1-3

Samuel's views on, 18

Homesickness, 5

Hungarian Revolution, 1-2

Ivory, 8

Khartoum

return from, 15

Lake Albert

discovery of, 9

Lake Edward, 7

Lake Victoria, 7

Nile River

map of, 11

Ottoman Empire, 2

Poison arrows, 9, 12

Porters

natives used as, 9-11

Royal Geographical Society, 17

Salt, 6, 9, 15

Singh, Maharaja Duleep, 2

Sudan, 16-18

Starvation and rumored death, 13

Victoria, Queen

and society, 18

and jubilee, 17-18

Vidin, 1, 3

White Nile

characteristics of, 4, 9

source of, 11-12

expedition to, 9-12

This Lily and Meena presented to the blank stares and confusion of their classmates and teacher.

CHAPTER 9

Everything of Consequence for the Fate of the Universe

It was particle physics…that reigned supreme during that first dazzling microsecond [after the Big Bang], when virtually everything of consequence for the fate of the universe took place
.

—
T
o
THE
H
EART OF
M
ATTER
: T
HE
S
UPERCONDUCTING
S
UPER
C
OLLIDER,
1987

T
HE
MEN OF
THE
NEIGHBORHOOD
LEFT
FOR
WORK
EACH
MORNING
dressed in sweaters and polo shirts, but Abhijat emerged each morning in a suit, his ensemble varying only in his choice of tie, a habit since his university years. It was a practice often mistaken for sartorial particularity, but in reality, the habit of the suit, its reliable, unwavering sameness, was comforting to Abhijat. He wore it almost like a uniform, and it was when he donned this uniform and prepared to leave for the Lab that he felt most at ease, knowing that he was headed toward the place where he felt most at home in the world.

Evenings, when he returned to Eagle's Crest, he joined the great parade of husbands returning home, greeting one another with a raised hand or a nod as they made their way into the neighborhood and toward their homes through the maze of the subdivision's circles, drives, and cul-de-sacs.

Each night, Abhijat parked the car in the garage and walked down the driveway to the mailbox to collect the day's mail. Frequently, he found himself performing this ritual at the precise moment Carol's husband, Bill, was doing so as well, and here they exchanged the kind of awkward greeting that passes between men who have little in common and know it, their conversations inevitably stilted and perplexing on both ends.

Abhijat felt most comfortable conversing with his colleagues, and he looked forward each morning to his arrival at the Lab. Unlike his neighbors and, he imagined, most Americans, Abhijat did not look forward to the weekends, for they were a time of forced exile (at Sarala's suggestion) from the Lab. If he must work on the weekends, she had asked, couldn't he at least do so from his study at home? Abhijat had agreed to this compromise, but it was time he did not relish because, as he worked, he was acutely aware that just outside his window, the other husbands of the neighborhood were at work in their yards and garages, on home improvement projects, playing catch in the yard with their children. And it was then that he felt so keenly different. So other.

The window of his study looked out over Bill and Carol's garage, where Bill kept his antique sports car (with the exception of summer weekends, when he wheeled it out into the driveway to wax and polish it as gently as if he were bathing an infant). Each time Abhijat looked up from his desk, he saw Bill at work on the car or endlessly puttering in the yard. What, Abhijat wondered, did he find to do out there?

Abhijat had taken to working during the weekends behind a closed door, blinds twisted tightly shut against the reminder of this parallel world to which he did not belong.

Sarala had come to realize that, with the exception of Meena, Carol was the first friend she'd had in years. She had, of course, been friendly with Lily's mother for as long as the girls had been friends, exchanging pleasantries as they dropped the girls off and picked them up at one house or the other. But Carol was the first friend who felt like she belonged to Sarala, a friend by choice rather than circumstance.

She spent her mornings now at Carol's house sipping coffee while Carol filled orders and updated her clients' product histories. “It helps me keep track of what they like and don't like,” she explained.

Sarala sat beside her, leafing through a set of the flip charts Carol used to prepare for her Mary Kay parties—images of beautiful, sophisticated American women and the Mary Kay products that had helped them achieve that look. They were mostly white women, here and there a token black or Asian woman included. There were, as Sarala had come to expect, no women who looked like her. On the back of the photos were tips for the consultants: “Help your hostess feel special by gesturing to her as you say her name.”

“When does Abhijat come back from his conference?” Carol asked, looking up from the pink binder in which she was recording the minutia of her clients' cosmetic preferences.

Abhijat had left earlier in the week for the International Workshop on Charm Physics, where he was delivering a paper on Hidden Charm. During his absence, Sarala had taken the opportunity to clean his study, a part of the house she rarely ventured into, being so infrequently invited. As she made her way into the room, she could sense the disturbance she made in the air, in the dust that coated the bookshelves and the spaces on his desk not covered in paper. Armed with one of Meena's old cloth diapers and a bottle of Pledge, she had set about cleaning what she could without disarranging anything. Here and there she found triangles of desktop peeking out from among the lined white paper on which he had scribbled equations, and these she approached gingerly, with a fingertip, loath to move something out of place that might someday explain this enormous and astonishing world in which they lived.

As she worked, she found herself recalling with perfect clarity, much to her own surprise, something she'd read in one of her schoolbooks years ago: “A well-ordered home helps to make well-ordered men.”

What would Abhijat be like, she wondered, without his position at the Lab, without all of this. She looked out over his desktop. On top of the piles of paper that covered the desk sat a yellow legal pad covered with Abhijat's neat, bold handwriting:

H
OW
MANY
QUARK
SPECIES
ARE
THERE?

H
OW
DO
THE
QUARKS
BEHAVE WITH
HADRONIC
MATTER?

W
HAT
IS
THE
NATURE OF
THE
WEAK
NEUTRAL
CURRENT?