Occasionally they encountered school-aged children on field trips. Often they crossed paths with other mothers and their children, most of them older than Meena. But Sarala loved Heritage Village best on quiet days when, aside from the costumed villagers, she and Meena were the only ones there. Then, it was easy to feel part of the illusion, part of this imagined past.
The first time she had come, not realizing that she could simply wander the grounds as she liked, Sarala had signed up for the Time Traveler Tour. She and Meena, paired with a group of mothers and children, were led through the grounds by a costumed tour guide who, after explaining that they were to imagine they had been transported back in time to colonial America, asked, “Before we begin our exploration, does anyone have any questions?”
One little boy’s hand shot into the air immediately, as though he had been waiting for just this moment.
“Jacob, what is your question?” his mother hissed at him.
He looked back at her and whispered, “Where are the chickens?”
The mother looked exasperated. “If I hear about chickens one more time. This is not a farm, Jacob.”
But another child had beaten him to it. “Do you have any live animals from the time period here?” a little girl called out.
The guide smiled at her, looking, Sarala thought, as though this was a question she answered frequently. “I’m afraid not. No animals. But if you’ll all follow me, we’ll begin our tour at the schoolhouse.”
The group followed her down the pathway toward the white clapboard building, Sarala holding Meena’s small hand as they walked.
Inside the one-room schoolhouse, they passed a row of benches and coat hooks in the entryway and came into a square room filled with desks arranged around a large grey metal stove, the teacher’s long desk at the front of the room under a wall-length chalkboard. “Schoolhouses of the period were not like schools today,” the guide began, encouraging them all to take seats in the wrought iron and wood desks arranged in neat rows.
Sarala sat down sideways in one of the child-sized desks, Meena resting on her knees. The tour guide took on a schoolmarm’s imperious tone and began to read out a list of the school rules, which had been chalked out on the blackboard:
Children should be seen and not heard.
Speak only when spoken to.
Idleness is sinful.
A fine hand indicates a fine mind.
Busy hands maketh a quiet mouth.
The children in the tour group snuck looks at the adults in the room, wondering how far they were willing to play along with this game of pretend. Along the wall, Sarala noticed wooden signs that read:
Idle girl
Idle boy
Tongue Wagger
Bite-Finger Baby
These, the guide explained, had been hung by the teacher around the necks of disobedient students.
Sarala looked down at Meena on her lap and wondered what her child’s education here in the States would be like. Surely quite different from her own, from Abhijat’s.
Later, Sarala would learn that she and Meena could wander the grounds on their own, peeking into the buildings that interested them, interacting with the villagers stationed in the tall, red-brick mansion at the top of the hill, in the post office, or in the sawmill. Wandering the grounds this way, Sarala could imagine what Nicolet must have looked like in the years before the arrival of the Lab, though here and there the illusion was broken by the power lines strung along the streets that bordered the grounds or the sound of the football team practicing off in the distance where Heritage Village abutted the high school.
And so, together, Sarala and Meena discovered America, Abhijat in his office surrounded by chalkboard walls on which he had scratched out equations that might predict the existence of some heretofore unknown part of the universe so tiny that Sarala had to ask him again and again for some way to conceive of it, to hold this smallness in her mind.
“The proton,” he explained, “is to a mosquito as a mosquito is to Mercury’s orbit around the sun.” And then she reminded herself that the particles he worked on were even smaller than a proton.
What Sarala understood was that what Abhijat and the other theoretical physicists worked with was possibility, and beneath it, nothing concrete. She imagined his workdays, his head cradled in his hand, looking up, out the window, perhaps, out over the prairie, imagining the physical world into being.
She wondered if thinking about such tiny particles all day caused him to see the world they lived in as ungainly, inelegant.
Sarala felt it was her job to make their home life, herself, and Meena as unobtrusive to Abhijat as possible so that he might occupy his mind with greater matters. She was proud of his work, read carefully through each article he published, understanding here and there only a bit of it. The fact that she — herself a smart woman, she knew — could understand so little of it was the source of a strange sort of pride for Sarala.
In letters home to the grandmothers, Sarala recorded Meena’s latest accomplishments: toddling across the living room unassisted, successful recitation from beginning to end of the alphabet, each new word she acquired — as well as Abhijat’s: a paper in the latest issue of a journal she understood from Abhijat’s enthusiasm to be important, a presentation at a prestigious conference. And in this careful recording, it escaped Sarala’s attention that she never once included news of her own.
And when might you and Abhijat begin thinking about another child? her mother had written. I don’t know, Sarala replied, leaving out any mention of the series of charts, graphs, and spreadsheets Abhijat had presented to her, as though to an audience at a conference, shortly after Meena was born, each one outlining the benefits of one rather than a houseful of children.
Together they’d thought long and hard about their decision. For Sarala, it had been difficult to argue with such persuasive data, and it pleased her to know that their decision meant they could devote themselves to Meena. She had a sense that it would be best to evade questions on the subject for as long as possible, but she had also begun to think about how she might explain their decision to the grandmothers, who would, she suspected, certainly be disappointed. She had been working on the following for when she could avoid the question no longer: that blessed with a beautiful child, healthy and of an easy temperament, Sarala and Abhijat had decided that one was enough. That one child, rather than many, meant they would be able to dedicate themselves and their resources to her, ensuring that what would march out before her would be a fine future, full of opportunity and possibility.
One afternoon, Abhijat invited Sarala and Meena to have lunch with him in the Lab’s cafeteria. It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm, so Sarala loaded Meena into her stroller and walked through the neighborhood, across the busy Burlington Road, waiting first at the light, then making their way over the crosswalk and along the paths of the Lab grounds. Beside the pathways, the mowed lawn sprung up suddenly into wild prairie grasses, which blew in the warm wind like a soft brown ocean. When the trees rose up around them, they walked under the shady canopy of leaves until they emerged at the reflecting pond, the Research Tower rising up over the water and prairie grasses.