1. Empirically Strange
Chapter 1 of 'A Theory of Relativity' where she brings a strange surprise home
She liked Frank Sinatra. There used to be evenings when she played his songs as we sat chatting about the inappropriate directions in which our day had gone or the whereabouts of our tomorrows. Sometimes she would make coffee and sandwiches for us and on other days we ordered burgers and tea. I was never good at preparing any kind of food or drink. But she really had a knack for putting together delicious meals. It was a sheer phenomenon when she was doing this. She would be putting stuffs in the pan, cutting tomatoes, toasting bread, spreading jam on the slices and humming a pop song all at the same time.
She wanted to play the piano. But she could never find time to learn it. Once she even enrolled herself in a piano class. But as it turned out a month of tutoring was not enough to reach the level at which she wanted to play. She said she needed more time which was not possible. But I thought that she had learnt a good deal. She could do most of the popular songs after a few trials and once or twice she even did the classics. And her style of playing was very unique. Even though the tune was flowing out of it, she didn't quite give the impression that she was playing it in a flow. It seemed that she was using the keyboard or some kind of calculator as she hit the black and white keys in an array to produce a continuous flow of sweet sounds. Her style though different wasn't very noticeable unless one couldn't stop looking at her like I did. I often told her that it was beautiful how she was playing, but she never allowed herself the pleasures of the compliments that I offered.
Once she told me that it would have been better if I was a pianist. I laughed at this thought as I tried imagining myself playing pianos in half-filled restaurants and fancy bars. I wasn't doing well even in my imagination. She laughed as if she too saw how indifferently I pressed the keys. "I like my work." I said. She smiled reassuringly.
She liked my work too even though she didn't quite understand it. Actually that's not true. She understood it but not the way it's understood usually. Once I tried explaining the theory of relativity to her. But she stopped me halfway. She said it was too routine a happening to be delivered through equations.
I was taken aback. Had she been secretly studying my notes? She had so effortlessly summarized the theory in a line in her own way of course.
"What do you mean by that?" I asked her.
She looked at me as if I had forgotten some very important detail. "Are you seriously asking me that?"
"Yes. Too routine you said; right?"
"Well, what I mean to say is that this concept of relativity is implicit in our lives. We just need to see it." Her eyes had started showing off their shine and her tone had become steady. "Take our lifespans for instance. We do not live for the same number of years. Some die old and weak, while some die so young. But whenever we may die, we all live one life each. So, what I am saying is that if we all have one life each but different number of years, then surely time must be relative. Either the life or the lifespan is constant and thus eventually relative." I could see the spark in her eyes had reached its zenith. "Do you get what I mean?"
"Of course I do. Not very different from the actual relativity concept, I must say." I said. "Einstein thought time was a rubber. It expands and dilates and all those things. But ma'am today you have finally put some aesthetics in it."
She smiled. "Is that sarcasm?"
"What's the use of sarcasm if the subject doesn't get it? If anything I would like your permission to call you a weird genius." I said.
"Well, all geniuses are weird!" She whispered and then we kissed like long-lost lovers.
This wasn't the first of her quirky, weird and genius thoughts. Once, she said something about the center of the universe being located at where it all started and that it should be a common ground for every kind of existence. For her center wasn't just a geographical spot but almost a spiritual concept which gave meaning to existence and to which everything will return. Where does she get all these thoughts from?
She never said anything that related to any theories, postulates or equations and she was very far from any mathematics, which is actually the train used to lug Physics around. But every now and then she said something that seemed to paraphrase a few points of Physics from here and there using daily life analogies. People usually didn't get the small pulses of classical or quantum inferences that she sprayed around, but then it would have been a professional shame for me not to notice the same.
I liked her quirkiness. I mean it could be only her to bring, unannounced, a big piano on one of the evenings to our place. As the porters left the place smiling with the large tip that she handed them, I looked at the piano which looked almost crestfallen for lack of space in that tiny spare room. I would have consoled the piano, but then I had other important things waving in my mind. I turned towards her and asked with my eyes and stretched eyebrows to explain the big surprise, but clearly it was a bad choice of communication as she smiled and went off into the kitchen and asked if I would like some coffee. I peeked into the kitchen and answered her again by moving my eyeballs from one corner of the sockets to the other to say that I didn't. But again I failed at it, because after a few minutes she presented me with a cup of hot coffee that smelled like earth after rain.
We didn't talk about the piano again till after a month. It was in the spare room and its absence from my observable universe accorded it a kind of invisibility. At the time I was busy preparing a series of lectures on "Wave-Particle Duality", one of the many weirdest things you will hear a physicist say. Imagine saying this to a person with no background in the physical sciences, "Hey, this apple that you see is actually made up of waves but you cannot know that because your eyes have limitations. Only if you could see it in a very zoomed out way, you would know that". That person would think that either you have gone mad or cracked somewhere on your head. But it isn't anyone's fault except of the subject itself. I mean, with the recent invasion of Quantum Mechanics, Physics has become so less about the physical things and so much about thoughts and logic which are empirically strange.
So finally when I was done expounding these strange theories to a baffled audience for a month, I finally returned home emitting a heartfelt relief with a smile on my face in the likeness of some sort of radiation. I was still lying on the bed when she returned from work. I opened the door because there was only a single key to the apartment which I carried all the time, since I spent more time in here than at work. We never thought of getting a duplicate key mainly because there was no need.
After our routine greetings of affection, I went to the kitchen to make us some coffee. As I was filtering the brown liquid which didn't smell anything like earth after rain but like some machine-made coffee, I noticed the big piano that was lying in the spare room which was in front of the kitchen. And suddenly my mind processed the data for the past month at a speed only lesser than that of light and made a conclusion that was, like Physics without the utter importance of the subject, empirically strange. Actually to be fair, it was just a hypothesis.
As I passed the coffee mug to her, I asked, this time using a better form of communication: that of language, "Are you storing that piano here for someone?"
She smiled at me and said a quick 'No'. She then followed it up with a quick remark, "You could do better with the coffee."
Now, my mind concluded that my hypothesis was now a theory, that this was in fact empirically strange: she hadn't played the piano even once. What's more, she hadn't even touched the piano once!
… to be continued
©Zeeshan Akhtar