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Chapter 3
Stars Under a Kerosene Lamp
The village of Rampur Khas sat on a flat plain in eastern Uttar Pradesh, surrounded by fields that were brown in November and gold in March and the exhausted cracked grey of August, when the monsoon had done its work and moved on. There was no hill visible from anywhere in the village. There was no river nearby. There was only the plain, which extended in every direction with a flatness that was not beautiful exactly but was immense — a kind of horizontal immensity that made the sky feel close, made the stars at night feel low and accessible, made the horizon feel simultaneously hopeful and oppressive.
Four hundred and twelve families lived in Rampur Khas in 1978, the year that Arjun Kumar and Meera Prasad began attending the village secondary school. Of those four hundred and twelve families, perhaps forty owned enough land to be considered comfortable. Perhaps fifteen had a member in government service — a post office clerk, a school teacher, a constable — which in that economy represented a kind of stability that others looked up to and discussed with a mixture of admiration and barely suppressed envy. The rest farmed, or did labor, or made things with their hands, or simply managed, which was its own full-time occupation.
The electricity came for four hours in the evening on good days. On bad days — which were more common — it came for two hours or not at all. Water was from wells and from a hand pump installed by the government on the main lane in 1974, which was still functioning but required several vigorous minutes of pumping to produce anything useful. The nearest medical facility with a doctor was thirty-two kilometers away, across a road that became impassable mud during heavy rain. Several children born in Rampur Khas in those years died of things that in other places — in the cities, in the schools that prepared students for AIIMS — would have been treated and survived. This was not extraordinary. This was ordinary. This was the ordinary of that place.
Into this ordinary, Arjun Kumar had been born in 1965.
He was the second of four children and the first son, which in that household meant something specific. His father, Ramkhelawan Kumar, was a man of moderate intelligence and strong will who had been pulled from school at age twelve to work in the fields when his own father fell ill, and who had never entirely forgiven this circumstance but had also never found a way to talk about it. He was not a cruel man. He worked hard and paid his debts and was respected in the village for a kind of stolid reliability that passed, in that economy, for character. He had decided early in Arjun’s life that his son would study and get a government job — a post in the state administration, perhaps a teacher’s position, something with a salary and a pension. A dream small enough to be achievable. Large enough to transform the family’s circumstances.
Nobody in Rampur Khas had imagined a doctor. That was not an accusation. It was a geographical fact, like the absence of hills.
Arjun’s mother, Durga, was a woman of deep religious faith and practical intelligence who had married at sixteen and had produced four children and had organized the household around the scarce resources available to her with the focused efficiency of a very good engineer who happens to be working without tools. She prayed every morning before anyone else was awake, squatting before the small brass idols in the prayer corner, her lips moving quietly. She was the person in the household who first recognized that Arjun was different — that the quality of attention he brought to his textbooks was not ordinary studiousness but something more essential, a hunger.
She never said this aloud. But she cut corners on other things to keep his school fees paid. She kept this from Ramkhelawan, who might have argued, and from Arjun, who would have protested. She simply did it, the way she did everything practical and necessary: quietly, without drama, with the complete competence of someone who has decided that a thing needs to be done and that the doing of it is not a subject for discussion.
~ ~ ~
Meera Prasad’s family lived on the other side of the village from the Kumars, separated by the main lane and the hand pump and three rows of connected mud-walled houses.
Her father, Suresh Prasad, was a man of four bighas and considerable village pride. He had expanded his house once, adding a room at the back, which was a statement of prosperity in Rampur Khas in the way that a new car might be in a city. He had connections — distant relatives in the district administration, a cousin who had married into a slightly better-off family in the next town. He held himself as a man of standing, which he was, by the precise standards of Rampur Khas, and this standing was both his great pride and his great limitation, because it meant that everything he did was measured against what a man of standing was expected to do, and a man of standing in Rampur Khas was expected, in 1980, to marry his daughters well.
He had three daughters. Meera was the second.
She had been reading before she started school. Her older sister Rekha had taught her the alphabet as a game one slow summer afternoon, drawing letters in the dust of the courtyard with a stick, not intending to actually teach but finding, with surprise, that the lesson was taking hold. Meera had the alphabet in two days and simple words in a week and by the time Rekha tired of the game, Meera had borrowed her school reader and was working through it independently.
Her mother, Laxmi, had found her one morning sitting with the reader open in her lap, sounding out words with the focused concentration of someone performing a task that requires all available attention. Laxmi had stood in the doorway and watched her daughter for a moment. Her expression had been complicated. Not displeasure — Laxmi was not opposed to reading. But a complicated maternal accounting that mothers in that place performed automatically: what this means, what this will cost, what it will or will not change about the essential arithmetic of a girl’s life.
She had gone back into the kitchen without saying anything.
Meera had kept reading.
By the time she started the village primary school she already knew most of what they were teaching. She finished first in class every year without apparent effort, which annoyed several boys and confused most of the teachers, who were not sure what to do with a girl who kept finishing first in class.
Her mother worried about her.
“You read too much,”
her mother would say, not unkindly, stirring the evening dal.
“Boys don’t like girls who read too much.”
“Then I won’t marry a boy who doesn’t like girls who read,”
Meera said.
Her mother sighed. This was a conversation they had often, in different forms. Her mother was not opposed to education, exactly. She just operated from a practical arithmetic of village life, in which a girl’s ultimate destination was marriage and children, and everything before that was preparation — or obstacle.
Meera was not interested in that arithmetic. She wanted to study science. She wanted to understand how the human body worked, how plants grew, how things burned and combined and transformed. She wanted answers to the questions that crowded her mind at night when she should have been sleeping. She was not sure yet what she wanted to do with those answers. She just knew she wanted them.
~ ~ ~
The secondary school in Rampur Khas went up to class ten. It was larger than the primary school, with seven classrooms and five teachers, and it drew students from two neighboring villages as well. The building had a small compound with a broken swing and a concrete pad that served as a badminton court when someone produced a net and a shuttlecock, which was approximately twice a year. The science classroom had equipment dating from the 1960s — a few glass beakers, a Bunsen burner that sometimes worked, a model of the human skeleton missing its left hand.
It was not impressive. But it had Shyam Lal.
Shyam Lal had come back to Rampur Khas at age twenty-eight to care for his ill mother and had stayed because he could not find a way to leave. He had studied mathematics and science at a college in Lucknow, and he had a particular gift for teaching that was less about conveying information and more about conveying how information works — how to think, how to ask the right questions, how to recognize what you do not know and figure out how to find it. He was strict without being unkind. He had very high standards and he applied them without apology. His students consistently performed better than the district average.
He recognized Arjun and Meera on the first day of class nine.
The problem he had written on the board at the beginning of that first class was a standard algebraic expression. He had asked the class to solve it, expecting the normal slow result. Two hands went up at exactly the same moment. Arjun, second row, left side. Meera, third row, right side.
Shyam Lal pointed to Arjun. Arjun gave the correct answer.
Shyam Lal looked at Meera.
“Same answer?”
“Yes sir. But he took five steps. It can be done in three.”
Several boys laughed. Arjun’s ears went red. Shyam Lal studied her for a moment — not annoyed. Interested.
“Show me.”
She came to the board. Her writing was small and precise, each number exactly placed. She wrote three lines. The result was the same. The path was cleaner.
Shyam Lal stared at the board for several seconds. Then he turned to the class.
“Both of these approaches are correct. His is standard. Hers is more elegant. In mathematics, elegant matters. Both of you stay after class.”
~ ~ ~
That was how it started.
Shyam Lal recognized something in both of them that was rare in Rampur Khas — a quality of mind that was not just hardworking but genuinely quick, genuinely curious. He began lending them books from his own small shelf. Science magazines from the city, a year old but still full of things they had never encountered. Extra problem sets he designed himself. He gave them a key to the school library on Saturday mornings.
The library was one shelf. Forty-two books, of which perhaps twenty were useful. But those twenty books were twenty more than either of them had encountered, and they read them with the focused intensity of people who understand that the supply is limited.
The friendship between Arjun and Meera grew in the way that friendships between serious students grow — through the shared obsession with problems that no one else around them found particularly interesting. They argued about mathematics. They disagreed about science. They corrected each other’s errors without ceremony and were corrected in return without resentment. This was unusual between a boy and a girl in Rampur Khas in 1979, and it attracted the mild gossip that anything unusual attracts in a small place, but Shyam Lal was their teacher and he was known to be strict about conduct, so the gossip remained mild and eventually found other subjects.
They began studying together in earnest through class nine and all of class ten — at the school on Saturdays, and then at Arjun’s home, at the small veranda where a charpoy served as bench and table. On evenings when the electricity failed — which was most evenings — they studied by the light of a single kerosene lamp.
The lamp was small and its flame was orange and it smelled of oil and it cast a circle of wavering light in the dark. Insects gathered at it. The flame bent when the wind came. But inside that circle of light, Arjun and Meera studied. Two notebooks open. One textbook between them. His writing careful and large. Hers small and precise. The sound of a village night around them — dogs, insects, someone’s radio playing film songs in the distance.
They talked about everything while they studied. About what they were learning. About what Shyam Lal had said. About the world beyond the dusty road that led out of Rampur Khas.
About what they wanted.
On one Saturday morning in October of class nine, Arjun found a book he had not seen before — thin, with a blue cover and a diagram of the human brain on the front. Introduction to Neuroscience. It had been left by a medical student from Lucknow who had done a community health posting in the village years before and had left the book because his bag was too heavy.
Arjun sat down with it and did not move for three hours.
Meera came in at ten o’clock, saw him sitting completely still, understood without asking that something important was happening, and sat at the other end of the room with her own book.
At noon, he looked up.
“The brain,”
he said.
“What about it?”
“It is the most complicated thing in the universe. And we can operate on it. We can go inside it with our hands and fix things. How is that possible?”
Meera looked at him.
“It is possible because people spent a long time learning how.”
“I want to learn how.”
“That is surgery.”
“I know.”
“It takes years. Many years. Medical entrance is extremely difficult.”
“I know.”
“Then why?”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Because there is nothing else I can imagine wanting to be.”
Meera looked at him for a long moment in the quiet of the small library, with the October sun coming through the single window and the dust moving slowly in the light.
“Good,”
she said finally.
“Don’t change your mind.”
~ ~ ~
The class ten board examinations happened in March. The results came in July. In the weeks between, life in Rampur Khas continued as it always did. Arjun worked in his father’s fields after school ended. Meera helped at home — cooking, cleaning, carrying water, looking after her younger siblings. They did not see each other as often. The village had its own logic about these things: now that school was over, the reason for their meetings had ended. Proper boundaries applied.
On the day the results came, someone brought a printed list from the district office and it was passed from family to family through the village.
Arjun’s result: 94.6 percent. First in the village.
Meera’s result: 96.2 percent. First in the district.
The village celebrated Arjun. There was a small gathering at his house. His father received congratulations. His mother made sweets. The headman came and shook Arjun’s hand and said he had brought honor to Rampur Khas. Shyam Lal came with tears in his eyes and squeezed Arjun’s shoulder and said, quietly, where others could not hear:
“Now you must not stop. You must go further. AIIMS. You understand? Do not let anyone stop you.”
Arjun understood. He asked about Meera, casually, to Shyam Lal, as the gathering continued.
Shyam Lal’s expression changed. Just slightly. A cloud passing.
“Her score was extraordinary,”
he said.
“I know that much.”
“But her father came to see me this morning. He did not come to celebrate her marks.”
~ ~ ~
Two days later, Arjun heard it from a neighbor woman who told his mother, who did not think to hide it from him.
Meera was getting married.
The groom’s name was Harish. He was from a village twenty kilometers away. He was thirty-one years old — nearly twice Meera’s age. He had studied only until class eight. He worked in his family’s provisions shop. His family had land and was considered respectable. His first wife had died of fever two years ago. He had two young children from that marriage.
He had seen Meera at a village fair three months ago and had sent word through relatives. The proposal had reached Meera’s father the same week the board examination results arrived.
Her father had looked at the two pieces of news — his daughter’s extraordinary exam result and an acceptable marriage proposal — and decided that one of them was relevant and the other was an interesting detail.
The wedding was planned for two months away.
Arjun stood in his family’s kitchen after hearing this, the sweet his mother had just made him growing cold in his hand, and felt something in his chest that he had no framework for. It was not sadness exactly. It was larger than sadness. It was the feeling of a door closing — not on himself, but on someone who deserved more doors to open.
He put down the sweet. He walked outside.
The village was going about its evening. Smoke from cooking fires. Children playing. Goats being herded. The sun going down orange and tired behind the flat horizon.
He stood at the edge of the lane outside his house for a long time.
Then he went inside and opened his notebook. He did not write anything. He just sat with the open page in front of him until the light failed and there was nothing to see.