Bikash Sinha http://www.telegraphindia.com/1150711/jsp/opinion/story_30807.jsp In Cambridge, the swinging Sixties were a carnival time soaked in Beatle-mania, long hair and blue jeans. British society was coming out, at last, of the grip of Victorian prudery. Yet, with all the massive changes in outlook, shades of Victoriana lingered on. There was still some space for romantic love. The Cam, the weeping willows and the Backs created a feeling for romance. I arrived there in 1964 and took on this headiness, head on.
In 1962, unknown to me and to many others, a young Oxford graduate had arrived in Cambridge. His name was Stephen Hawking. He was quite fit then, with an unusual taste in clothes - black or royal blue corduroy jacket with red bow tie. He was a research student in cosmology, under Dennis Sciama. Sciama used to teach us mathematics. One can still recall the precision and clarity of his lectures, and how he made mathematics unusually exciting. Stephen, at that time, was known to be a front-ranking researcher, but so many of that kind existed in Cambridge that nobody paid much attention. We also came to know of a young girl called Jane. She was not known very well on her own, but as the girlfriend of Stephen Hawking, who soon started getting ill by the day. Some even thought that she was a nurse. So, it is wonderful to have come across Jane Hawking's book, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen. Its last sentence pushed me to the edge of the real world, towards a world of abstract, serene beauty. I am referring to the relationship between two people of extraordinary calibre. Jane Hawking writes, "It certainly moved me profoundly and made me reflect what a privilege it was to travel even a short distance with him [Stephen] on the way to infinity." Jane entered St Albans High School in the outskirts of London. As a seven-year-old first-former in the early Fifties, she found, for a short spell, a boy with floppy, golden-brown hair, who sat by the wall in the next classroom: "We never spoke to each other, but I am sure this early memory is to be trusted." Stephen was a pupil in that school only for a term. By 1963, Stephen had come a little closer to Jane, and irreversibly fallen a victim to motor neuron disease. Fresh from Oxford, too, and in Cambridge as a graduate student, Jane gushes about their first encounter: "as the party drew to a close, we exchanged names and addresses". The first unsure step towards romantic love (but of the no-sex-please variety). An evening of theatre at the Old Vic, followed by dinner, made Stephen penniless. They had to go back to the hall to look for Jane's wallet, which may have fallen out there. They found it, but suddenly the lights went off. This is how Jane describes what happened next: "'Take my hand,' said Stephen authoritatively. I held his hand and my breath, in silent admiration as he led me back to the steps, up across the stage and out in the passage." Inevitably, they ended up at the May Ball in June, after exams. But Stephen slowly and surely got into the tunnel of depression, since the doctors did not give him much hope. So, for the first time in his life, as he confesses in My Brief History, Stephen started to enjoy working hard. "Back in Cambridge," Jane writes movingly, "one dark wet Saturday evening in October he hesitantly whispered a proposal of marriage to me. That moment transformed our lives." Jane gave up all her plans to join the diplomatic service, so that she could be with the man she loved. On July 14, 1965, Stephen married his childhood sweetheart, Jane, in the church of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. A whole new universe was about to be discovered by Stephen, followed by the Hawking radiation from black hole, one of the most original and impossibly creative discoveries in modern science. Life for the Hawkings was not so blissful. It was full of ups and downs, even drama - the struggle of a hugely creative mind caged within a crippled body, and of a modern woman totally dedicated to her partner's well-being. The most wonderful fate awaited them - the birth of their first child about two years after marriage. Jane describes poignantly the stirring of life in her womb: "As dry leaves danced through the streets before the biting December wind, Stephen and I stood hand in hand at the back of the lofty cold church..... The stirring words of the funeral service [of Mr Thatcher, their neighbour], intoned as the coffin was carried into the church sent a chilling shiver down my spine. Watching and listening, I was haunted by the paradox that in one stroke, death had erased all the learnings, the experience ... the memories of that life which we were taking our leave while within me I was carrying the miraculous beginnings of a new life... Beside me stood the child's father, young and vibrant despite the onset of disability." Jane and Stephen became delirious when their daughter, Lucy, arrived - and miracles of all miracles, Tim arrived when Stephen was already wheelchair bound, and slowly losing his speech. I met Stephen properly (in the English sense) in 1974 at the California Institute of Technology. He was already wheelchair bound, but continuously gesticulating to Richard Feynman - eccentric physicist and Nobel laureate - with his long fingers, as if he had got hold of his favourite black hole. Then, Jane found Jonathan, and Stephen got a trophy called Elaine. The Camelot of Jane and Stephen was over. Eventually Elaine could'nt take it any more and left Stephen at the mercy of a housekeeper and a nurse. I last met a very frail Stephen Hawking at a banquet at King's College, Cambridge, to celebrate fifty years of the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics in 2007. I gently reminded him about Caltech 1974, and the young lady who was there said, "But that was a long time ago." May be, I said, but for Hawking radiation it was just yesterday. A long silence, followed by two words on the screen, "May be." As I walked out of the hall into the glorious summer evening, I pondered the eight hundred years of Cambridge University, and that Hawking radiation, like the twinkling of an evening star, would go on for the entire lifetime of the Universe. Jane Hawking kindled the light that radiates across that infinite Universe - and how bravely, how brilliantly, and how movingly. -- Avinash Shahi Doctoral student at Centre for Law and Governance JNU Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. 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