Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya Page B

Abhijat looked up from his desk, he saw Bill at work on the car or endlessly puttering in the yard. What, Abhijat wondered, did he find to do out there?
    Abhijat had taken to working during the weekends behind a closed door, blinds twisted tightly shut against the reminder of this parallel world to which he did not belong.

    Sarala had come to realize that, with the exception of Meena, Carol was the first friend she’d had in years. She had, of course, been friendly with Lily’s mother for as long as the girls had been friends, exchanging pleasantries as they dropped the girls off and picked them up at one house or the other. But Carol was the first friend who felt like she belonged to Sarala, a friend by choice rather than circumstance.
    She spent her mornings now at Carol’s house sipping coffee while Carol filled orders and updated her clients’ product histories. “It helps me keep track of what they like and don’t like,” she explained.
    Sarala sat beside her, leafing through a set of the flip charts Carol used to prepare for her Mary Kay parties—images of beautiful, sophisticated American women and the Mary Kay products that had helped them achieve that look. They were mostly white women, here and there a token black or Asian woman included. There were, as Sarala had come to expect, no women who looked like her. On the back of the photos were tips for the consultants: “Help your hostess feel special by gesturing to her as you say her name.”
    â€œWhen does Abhijat come back from his conference?” Carol asked, looking up from the pink binder in which she was recording the minutia of her clients’ cosmetic preferences.
    Abhijat had left earlier in the week for the International Workshop on Charm Physics, where he was delivering a paper on Hidden Charm. During his absence, Sarala had taken the opportunity to clean his study, a part of the house she rarely ventured into, being so infrequently invited. As she made her way into the room, she could sense the disturbance she made in the air, in the dust that coated the bookshelves and the spaces on his desk not covered in paper. Armed with one of Meena’s old cloth diapers and a bottle of Pledge, she had set about cleaning what she could without disarranging anything. Here and there she found triangles of desktop peeking out from among the lined white paper on which he had scribbled equations, and these she approached gingerly, with a fingertip, loath to move something out of place that might someday explain this enormous and astonishing world in which they lived.
    As she worked, she found herself recalling with perfect clarity, much to her own surprise, something she’d read in one of her schoolbooks years ago: “A well-ordered home helps to make well-ordered men.”
    What would Abhijat be like, she wondered, without his position at the Lab, without all of this. She looked out over his desktop. On top of the piles of paper that covered the desk sat a yellow legal pad covered with Abhijat’s neat, bold handwriting:
    H OW MANY QUARK SPECIES ARE THERE?
    H OW DO THE QUARKS BEHAVE WITH HADRONIC MATTER?
    W HAT IS THE NATURE OF THE WEAK NEUTRAL CURRENT?
    As she cleaned, she was surprised and a little sad to realize that his absence that week had hardly registered for her, nor, it seemed, for Meena. It was as though they had both come to think of Abhijat as a person who existed only in the mind rather than in their shared physical space.
    Even the things he studied weren’t really present in the physical sense, she thought. Their very existence was hypothetical. He and the other theorists were predicting that these tiny parts of the world existed. But ultimately, who knew?
    Sarala had begun to think that, in this sense, Abhijat’s work was not so very unlike that of the fortune tellers she had seen on the streets of Bombay, who might take your hand and, tracing the lines of your palm, hypothesize a future