The Abundance: A Novel (16 page)

The medal was still swinging, pendulum-like. Dr. Tim told Abhi the interview would be edited for time and “flow,” so he should feel free to stop and restart an answer if he wanted to; they would smooth things out in the cutting room. Abhi nodded and stilled the medal between his thumb and forefinger. When he let go, it began ticking again, side to side. Both Abhi and Dr. Tim waited before starting to record, staring until it hung still. The cameraman put up his hand and counted down with his fingers. The Record light went on.

Dr. Tim’s demeanor changed. His posture improved. His voice took on the slightly high-pitched friendliness I knew from segments warning about processed sugar and fatty diets. He said a few brief things about how honored he was to meet Abhi. My husband glanced at me and nodded. Dr. Tim asked his first question.

“Can you tell our viewers a little bit about the Millennium Prize questions?”

“Well, in 2003, the Clay Mathematics Institute announced seven unsolved problems in mathematics. These were problems that have been hanging around, waiting for someone to provide a proof. Some of the problems were unsolved for centuries. Around 2005, I started working on one of the problems. I worked on it pretty regularly, and last year, I had what I felt was a publishable solution.”

“And how much was the award?”

“Yes, ahem,” said Abhi, flushing. I noticed he had not mentioned the award money. His voice went soft. “One million dollars.”

“One million dollars! What are you planning on doing with all that prize money?”

“Well…” Abhi looked at the floor.

“Any vacations planned?”

“Not at the moment.”

Dr. Tim nodded. “All right.” He checked his notes. “Tell us: Were you always good at math in school?”

“I was good enough to get good grades. I certainly enjoyed it more than other subjects.”

“So how did you end up in medicine?”

Abhi’s shrug was more eloquent than it looked. It expressed everything: the passivity in the face of his father’s profession, his title not inherited, but feeling that way, like the left-sided part to his hair. But the shrug also said
It never really bothered me
. People had trouble understanding how he had never felt constrained by his destiny. They thought medicine demanded absolute dedication, or at least sustained focus. But Abhi had excelled while in a state of perpetual distraction. It was as if he had read his textbooks using peripheral vision. On our coffee table, the
Journal of the American Medical Association
frequently sat under the
Journal of the American Mathematical Society
.

“Will you go on practicing medicine, now that you’re a world-famous mathematician?”

Abhi smiled and shrugged again. “My life hasn’t changed as a result of this. I really can’t imagine my life without Neurology at this point.” It was true: He had gotten the call about the award during morning rounds, had stilled the phone’s buzzing when he saw it wasn’t me, and resumed eye contact with the third-year medical student presenting a case. He finally found out four hours later, when he happened to check his seven messages. I hadn’t found out until 6:30
PM
that day because a complicated add-on consult had kept him late at work.

“So you have two passions, then: your numbers and your patients?”

Abhi, in utter innocence, said, “I wouldn’t say that. My passion has always been one thing only, mathematics.”

Dr. Tim looked at his papers and began again. “One of the most amazing things about this story is how you manage to be a full-time neurologist—and solve these daunting problems in your spare time. What’s your secret?”

“It was only one problem I solved.” Abhi spread his hands as if to show he was not guilty. “I think I can do it because I don’t need a big lab or anything. Many of the attempted solutions sent in for the Clay problems are the work of amateurs, actually. Much of this is theoretical. I didn’t need big computers.”

A pause. “Can you explain, for our viewers, how you did what you did? How you managed to crack this particular nut?”

Abhi shook his head. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Okay,” said Dr. Tim. He looked at the cameraman. The red Record light blinked off. “Do you think you might be able to, maybe, summarize what you did? I’m talking about a very simplified version, for our viewers. Just so they get a sense.”

Abhi scratched his ear. “That is … difficult. It’s not something you can just explain.”

He knew how difficult it was because he had tried with me, more than once. In his famous paper, he had written something beautiful and everlasting that only a few people on Earth could understand. And among their number was no one he loved. What he had written spoke of the universe but was not universal. All those years of secret exploration; at the end, a discovery, but one that was intrinsically secret. You could make it public and it would still remain secret.

“Are there any applications for your solution? Say, in technology? Engineering?”

Abhi scratched his ear again and looked at the camera to make sure it was off. “It’s really a proof, you know. It’s not a … it’s really very abstract.”

When he met mathematicians, it was no better. He was alien to them as well, the wealthy, well-spoken physician shaking hands with slouching unkempt professors and poverty-line grad students in jeans and tennis shoes. He had the absolute loneliness of the anomaly.

The interview started again. Dr. Tim, having gotten nowhere with questions about math, circled back to the other natural focal point of Abhi’s story. How did he find the time? Was he really self-taught? And then he rephrased a question he had asked earlier. “Why didn’t you decide to study mathematics in college?”

And this time, hearing it phrased this way—not why medicine; why
not
his true love—Abhi gave a different answer. “I felt I should do what was best, as a family man,” he said. “There really is no job as rewarding as medicine, in every way. I am very grateful. It’s very much a part of who I am now.” And then, with a flicker of the eyes in my direction, unconscious I am sure, he added, “There was never an opening for me to be another way.” Such an odd pair of statements, gratitude and regret in immediate succession. Dr. Tim did not register that oddness. He went on to other things. But I noticed it, and I felt a burning in my cheeks and neck. I knew what underlay that statement, even if Abhi didn’t. If his wife had worked, if this had been a two-income household, he might have had more time. He might have given up the profession that wasn’t his passion; he might have become a mathematician instead of a neurologist who solved a famous problem for a one-million-dollar prize. I remember looking at the boots of the cameraman and at the Rolex, platinum-heavy, on Dr. Tim’s wrist. I know Abhi meant no malice. He might not have been thinking of me. In the segment that aired (one minute and twelve seconds, all edited), you can hear a small tap during one of Abhi’s answers. That was me, resting my head against the blank austere plane of his study wall, blinking with sudden, bewildered, tearful guilt. Who might he have been had I not been me? How much better might he have been, if I had been better?

This is my room now. I have displaced him for good, haven’t I? He did eternal things in here. I have turned it into a clock tower with no time left. There it is, on the nightstand, just plugged in—my merely mortal arithmetic, blinking twelve.

*   *   *

Abhi’s mother grew immense in her last days. We bought a flat in Ahmedabad. It was important, to him and to the family (and maybe, had she been conscious then, to her), that she stay in
his
house. “My table, my house” was a fixation on Abhi’s side of the family, too. Wherever we kept our luggage was the most privileged house, but we also honored the politics of meals, and in which order we visited families. A get-together at some common venue wouldn’t do. The point wasn’t to meet everyone at once; the point was to show respect by coming and eating. We had to plan our meals to make sure we had eaten at every elder relative’s house before we left, ticking names off a mental checklist. The code also required that Abhi’s mother be cared for at her eldest son’s house. Our house in America was out of the question at this late stage. Our mothers began dying slowly at the same time. I stayed with my mother while Abhi brought his to the newly purchased flat. He and the most recent host brother transported and installed her like a piece of furniture. There: it was official now, Abhi was keeping her. His roof, his bed.

She could not thank him by then, near inanimate as she was. Inside her great girth hid a tiny girl-sized heart. Her coronaries were brittle, crooked, pinched in places. The deposits were everywhere: the arteries in her neck and belly, the big thumping aorta itself—her plumbing sparkled with calcium on the CT scan. Every so often, some fleck or chip would dislodge and swim to the tip of an artery. The spot of brain or heart just beyond, choked with blood, would smudge black. Little heart attacks, little periodic strokes; not enough to kill her. She lived months with a slight, marble-in-the-mouth slur to her speech. Later, her left arm and left leg turned to solid lead. Abhi’s father had died early, but his mother proved indestructible. Even after the sagging left face, the failing kidneys, the fingertips pricked for sugar readings; even after the horn-rimmed bifocals could not read the
Gita
; even after the incontinence, yellow on white, sarees drying as fast as they were sullied, pulled in off the balcony to swaddle a mummified parchment widow.

This indestructibility was its own curse. At first her body malfunctioned in small humiliating ways, error messages from the bladder, eyes, joints. The major strokes came only later. During those first years, her memory stayed inviolate while her mind peered over the side and observed the machine below going glitchy with age. It was much the same with my own mother. Our families were alike in that: The men died at thirty-nine, at forty-four, at forty-six. The garlanded photographs showed black hair. The widows lived forever.

It was not a bad life, at least not for Abhi’s mother, who had so many sons and stepsons—that is, so many daughters-in-law. She had been the patriarch’s second wife. The groom had plucked the gray from his mustache. The bride had just passed the nymph stage. Over seven years, she bore five sons, something that seems scarcely mammalian to me. No epidurals. Not even an Advil. Was she ever not pregnant? It is hard to imagine the Nehru-capped patriarch in the photograph grunting atop the wife still raw from the last child, splayed like an overripe orchid. But he did. The tally told the story.

Abhi’s father had been just as prolific in his first marriage. The stepbrothers’ wives were a few years older than Abhi’s mother. (I remember being confused at our wedding—so many venerable old ladies, yet his mother ordered them about,
tu, tu, tu
, second-person familiar.) Their closeness in age made the rivalries meaner.

The new matriarch, the stepsons, and their young wives all lived together in the massive house that Abhi’s grandfather had built. Bhola sahib, the father, had been a well-known judge. Even Abhi’s mother called her late husband
Bhola sahib—sahib
tacked on to the affectionate diminutive of Bholanath. It felt natural when the family said it, but was very odd when I thought about it. I couldn’t imagine an American family calling their father “Mister Bobby.”

Bearing her husband so many male children earned Abhi’s mother respect, even reverence. Superstitions rose around her—aging aunts and new brides came to touch her feet. Success in this one thing implied wisdom in all. From her cot in an inside room, no men allowed, she suckled her many toddlers. She kept nursing, I was told, until the youngest was five and during this time progressively absolved herself of all other duties. Her cot became the headquarters of the household. Orders issued from the room, and wives hurried in at the swing of a handbell like chambermaids to the invalid queen. And a queen mother she was, thirty-one years old, all-powerful yet curiously helpless. She drank milk to produce milk—prodigious liters, claimed the whispers—and never got out of the habit.

Who did this whispering? My sisters-in-law, behind their saree hems. Leaning close, they spoke in a whisper even when she wasn’t in the house or the city. I had some inkling, when they lowered their voices, how people must behave under tyranny: nowhere relaxed, always furtive. It wasn’t that they were afraid of their husbands overhearing; they told me nothing they hadn’t yelled in an argument. It was
she
whom they feared even in her absence.

Hearing of Abhi’s mother from Abhi, though, I could barely reconcile the two versions. To hear him talk, she was left a widow in a house full of grown stepsons and their wives. She was a minority in that house once her reason for being there—Abhi’s father—was gone. And she had her boys; she feared how they would be treated, these vulnerable sons of the second wife. The house, once the wives started bearing children, soon had a schoolyard crowdedness. Struggles for space, struggles for resources. The men were well educated, well off, every stepson English-speaking—but the old village cruelty against the widow was only a generation back.

So she fought from the first day of her widowhood, demanding the larger, upstairs rooms for her sons. Her milk sufficed only for the two youngest; so, for her three elder sons, she demanded glass after glass, calling the boys into her room and bidding them drink. Her behavior seemed paranoid, but Abhi told me, very earnestly, that the wives diluted the milk, made their rotlis smaller, ladled them lukewarm dahl. The eldest stepson, whom Abhi called Motabhai,
big brother,
handled the running of the house, but she forced him to transfer two bank accounts to her name. The cash she withdrew she hid in three locations (known only to her sons, who were sworn to secrecy), and disbursed for bicycles, pencils, shoes—and expensive kite string on Uttarayan, so they could slice the kites of their cousins and stepbrothers. Abhi spoke of his mother tearfully, as if she were the Rani of Jhansi or some other warrior queen. Imagine her young, semiliterate, alone, he said. The wives would have made a housemaid of her, had she let them. But she hadn’t; she had
fought
; and in time she came to dominate the household. Decades later, Abhi said proudly, when real estate was being bought up all over the city, Motabhai—himself stooped and bald by then, six years older than she was—traveled from Rajkot to sit before her and ask her permission to sell.