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immediately enrols in the grad programme. But what I saw on the roof terrace was more than a question of enrolment. As if I were looking at myself. Some significant but lost slice of time and space. When I was a young student, I, too, started seeing a woman a few years older than me. The affair started as pure lust, rightly or wrongly, and soon mutated into something special. Something more real. They always do. (But I shall divulge such matters a bit later.)
    That afternoon, right after he had discussed Pompeii and Herculaneum, Professor Singh sent me out of the class. Perhaps I had disrupted the lecture, although I remember this vaguely. As I was leaving he turned to me, smiled sardonically: Kal bhi nahin aana! Later I stood outside his office next to the bare semal tree with blood-red blossoms, then walked in with uncalculated slowness. I didn’t say sorry, and he demanded no apology. As usual, without permission, nervous as hell, I occupied the threadbare chair. He was typing a research paper, inserting a couple of sketches of two stable helium isotopes, 3He and 4He, using that old-fashioned ‘photocopy’ and ‘cut and paste’ technique. ‘So what are your plans?’ he asked. ‘India or the US?’ Those days I was open to working in my own country after graduation. In fact I was also open to sitting the GRE exams. ‘Are you a man with a plan?’ he asked. I told him I had kept both options open. ‘Then you have no plan.’ He gave me a piercing look. ‘Go abroad, but come back.’ It was rare to see him less open to discussion. His mind was already made up. ‘It is too bureaucratic, and too hierarchical, and too feudal here. People have insecurities,’ he explained bluntly. ‘A few years of exile will do you good. You are young and ambitious. You will see the world. You will be better accepted by the powerful – here – after that onion-skin higher degree from the US.’ He didn’t reveal his own details and decisions. I found out later. Most of the staff members in his own department accepted him only after a famous American professor, a Nobel Laureate, praised Professor Singh’s work during a keynote lecture at the academy of sciences.
     
    The next day the IIT colleague told me he knew nothing about Professor Singh’s family, but he took me through a long corridor to the Chair’s office, who said that Nelly (according to the grapevine) had moved to the hill station of Shimla. A ‘friend’ had come to the office to collect Mohan’s papers ‘but we,’ said the chair, ‘didn’t have the key ready, and even if it had been ready we would not have passed the boxes on to someone who claimed to be a mere friend’. The papers were still in storage until last year in the cryo lab. Early this summer during the annual clean-up, partly due to an oversight and partly due to a stupid clerical mistake, they got shredded.
    Don’t expect me to remember everything. A lot has simply faded away. Also, I am not implying that other teachers were crap and he was the lone phosphorescent giant. Perhaps premature death transforms a teacher in the eyes of the student. Even if the person was unpopular, immensely disliked, he becomes a myth, even mediocre students transform him into a benign myth. Small details, small movements made in the classroom, acquire more weight. Words said and unsaid more significance.
    I figured out only in the final year that thirty or forty minutes before the lecture Professor Singh would lock himself in the office and pace up and down and contemplate, in other words prepare his so-called spontaneity. (This was a pedagogical device and when I started teaching at Cornell I basically emulated the same technique and it delivered wonders and made me somewhat popular with the students.)
    I shall never forget my last visit to his office. The 19th of October, a faultless day like any other. The laburnum quivered in the sun, I recall, so bright it hurt my eyes. I placed the borrowed item on his