Tryst with a Nobel Laureate

I met him by accident when I missed a meeting with the celebrated poet AK Ramanujan who had died a week earlier in the same university. The secretary looked shocked when I sought an interview with the astrophysicist.

A journalist from India? Did I have an appointment? Besides, Dr Chandra does not like interviews. I pleaded with her to try. I had come all the way from Bangalore. Her telephone call later in the day to say “he will see you at noon tomorrow,” left me elated. But not for long. Waiting in her room the next day, I wondered what to ask a scientist about whom I knew nothing, when a tall figure in a grey suit appeared at the door.

“I am sorry to have kept you waiting,” he apologised.

As we stepped across the corridor, he peeled off a note from his door, saying, “I don’t think you saw this.”

It was a brief message: “Please wait inside. The door is open - SC.”

It was an awe-inspiring room. Books from ceiling to floor. Ramanujan and Newton looking at you from their great heights. Marble statues everywhere. A graceful Aphrodite rose from the array of books and papers on his table.

“Why did you want to see me?” he asked.

I have never interviewed anyone – before or after -- with greater apprehension. I knew I had no place in that room when he pointed out that I did not know his scientific work, nor read his books and publications, nor even heard his lectures which I would not have understood anyway. I felt that room and its occupant were my total undoing as a journalist when he held up this newspaper with my article on MS.

“I am glad to meet the author,” he smiled. Suddenly the room became friendly. The interview turned into a conversation.

Months later, I received this letter.

“Discounting the flattering things you say, I found your article very well written. In any event, I did enjoy our conversations and I look forward to meeting you again - though not for an interview!”

We did, whenever he visited Bangalore. Relaxing in a quiet garden in Jayanagar, Chandra would reminisce what science meant to him. It was a continued search for Truth, he said. But it needed years of sadhana or tapas. “Mozart discovered it in music. Monet glimpsed it through a haystack. Michelangelo found it in marble. Perhaps a scientist seeks it through a mathematical equation.”

The last time I met him, he said “Call me when you come to Chicago.” But I never saw him again. A faded photograph of his room is my only reminder of a brush with intellectual aristocracy.