Free The Ever After of Ashwin Rao by Padma Viswanathan Page B

that, then. Not much resources. Very little equipment, not too many graduate students. My area of research was elementary particles. I worked on muons, for my dissertation. You know much about …?”
    I’m sure I looked quite blank.
    “Doesn’t matter. Anyway, I got married in the summer between completing my PhD and coming to Lohikarma. After I arrived, and got settled, I started to see how competitive it could be to get research funding. Such a big part of your time, competing for grants and prizes and publications. Competing, competition … it’s not really my thing.”
    Seth used his hands when he talked—we all do that, Indians—but in concert with his eyebrows, as though one pair were conducting the other.
    “My wife, Lakshmi, arrived about six months later, in the middle of a Canadian winter, poor girl. I had to get her settled. I was the junior man on the totem pole that year, so I taught all the introductory classes. And I very much enjoyed it. Especially the classes for non-majors. I enjoy the feeling of bringing them into the field. Initially, students are fearful. They think they will be bored; they think they might feel unintelligent. But they come to love physics! It’s truly satisfying, truly so.
    “So. There was no real opportunity for me to continue my research that first year, and without my dissertation director, I felt a bit lost. I had enjoyed my research, but I didn’t kid myself into thinking I was the most brilliant physicist that ever walked the earth. Have you read any Richard Feynman? Now there’s a brilliant fellow. A very dedicated teacher, also. He used to say that if we can’t explain it to an undergraduate, we don’t know enough about it. I try to keep up. I read the journals, try to incorporate the new research into my courses. Keeps it interesting. You know? So many people out there are driven to do research, to write. I ride on their backs!”
    I smiled, still waiting for an answer to my question.
    “But, back then, my old mentor was writing a book, using the research I had conducted under his supervision. I read the book as he was writing, offered some suggestions. He invited me back to Indiana one summer, to work with him. And when the book was published, he gave me co-author credit. This was some four years after I was hired here. I had published two other papers in the meantime, also co-authored with him. Anyway, it was unusual, for a young physicist to have co-authorship on a book. I had good teaching reports. My colleagues liked me. I got tenure.
    “My children came along, and I kept on teaching—but research?” He shook his head. “Not for me. I never tried to advance beyond Associate level.”
    I would learn, in time, what a popular teacher he was, both among undergraduates and with his students in an adult education course, which he taught almost entirely using examples in nature and real-world experiments, rather than in a lab. He was beloved as a teacher, even while remaining a figure of some ridicule among his more ambitiouscolleagues. I was struck, then and later, by Seth’s having shaped his seeming lack of ambition into a professional niche, justifying his tenure by being both popular and indispensable: teaching courses that higher-reaching professors might feel were beneath them while also providing them with a gratifying sense of superiority.
    “I talked about it with Brinda, my eldest, when she was deciding whether to quit her PhD.” He leaned back in the lawn chair, put a hand in his blazer pocket as if to reach for cigarettes. I made a little note:
smoker?
Former, maybe. I would have smelled it. No one in Canada smokes anymore. “She did Biochem here, then took a break, a year or two off, then joined the epidemiology programme at the University of Alberta. An excellent programme, and I think she could have done very well, but the drive wasn’t there. She’s a brilliant girl. You are meeting her, this week?”
    “I met her this morning,” I