They married in the teeth of opposition from his family, and now she wondered if she had made a mistake. Her husband was much richer than anyone she had ever met, but he also worked much harder than anyone she knew, and his business took up most of his time. His family took seriously things she could not take seriously at all. His mother once told her gravely about a recent gathering of the Kaisar-i-Hind, only Indian Chapter of the Canadian Daughters of Empire.
‘How utterly ghastly’ (the only sane response to the story) would obviously bring on palpitations. Vivian murmured some noncommittal reply and downed a gin and tonic in a single swallow. Her mother-in-law added, impressively, an illustration of the loyalty of the Guides, who had concluded an assembly by rising and shouting fervently ‘One Flag, One Throne, One Empire!’ It looked bad to be having another drink so soon, but what could one do?
It was terribly, terribly hot. She lost three babies and they decided not to try for a while. Then she got pregnant again, and this time she was sent immediately to the hills. Various female members of the family offered to go with her, but her husband (fearing that the cooler climate might tempt her into the saddle) put his foot down. She was allowed to go on her own, and this time the child was born alive, but she was not well for a long time afterwards so she did not see much of it.
One of her brothers was growing coffee in Kenya. She had heard the climate was better there, and she asked one day if they could go to Kenya. She did not really think they could, because the family was all in Bombay and the business there took up so much time. Her husband walked up and down for a minute or so, and he said he thought it might be quite a good idea. He said he thought there would be opportunities in Kenya. He said it would mean starting over again, but all this fanaticism was not really his cup of tea.
They left Bombay when Sorabji was five, and his first memories were of the journey by ship to Mombasa.
He would wake late at night and his mother would be by the bed. In the gloom he would see only the glint of diamonds at her neck and ears, the white of her gloves; she would take him in her arms and carry him up to the deck where his father was waiting. She would hold him on the rail; below the pale foam melted into the dark water, above the stars were brilliant and close.
Sometimes some other passenger would come and protest that the child should be in bed. His mother would laugh and say that they might see a comet.
She would point out constellations while his father stood silently smoking. She explained that she had seen different stars as a child; she explained that the earth was like a ball in the air, and that if you were at one end of it you always looked out the same way.
His mother died of malaria when he was 12. His father sent him to a school in Britain.
The head of the school interviewed Sorabji, and he agreed to admit him to the school as a special favour, but he said he would have a lot of catching up to do. He said he was the most ignorant boy he had ever seen in his life.
The fact was that Sorabji knew a lot about mathematics and science and nothing else. He had been taught by correspondence course in Kenya, and as soon as the packet came in the post he would do all the mathematics and science and send it back, so that he made rapid progress in the subjects that interested him. He kept the arts papers in a pile on the floor to be done as time allowed. One day he thought he should do something about it because the pile was five feet high, but the early papers at the base of the pile had been eaten by ants, so he had given it up as a bad job.
He told the head that he knew quite a lot about science and mathematics, and the head said what this showed was that he was completely undisciplined. As he had covered most of the mathematics, biology, chemistry and physics of the O-level syllabus, however, those periods could be used to catch up on what he had missed.
Sorabji ran away from the school 27 times and was sent back each time.
The first time he ran away was at night. He looked up at the Northern sky; it was like going from a Bond Street jeweller to a street trader hawking chips of glass on cheap velvet. The moon was 240,000 miles away and that was far enough. The second time he ran away was just after dawn. He made his way along a canal to the next town and he saw an orange ball of flame shimmering through the trees and it was 93 million miles away. He made it all the way to his father’s house in London, but then he was sent back to the school. He kept running away and being sent back to the school and soon everything in the solar system was too close.
He was obsessed with distance. He had read of stars whose light had left them millions of years ago, and he had read that the light we see may come from stars now dead. He would look up and think that all the stars might now be dead; he thought that they were so far away there would be no way to know.
It was as if everything might really already be over.
One day he found a book on astronomy in the school library. Because he was interested in distance and the deaths of stars he turned first to a chapter on stellar evolution, and the book fell open on something called the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which used brightness and temperature to plot the evolution of stars. Sorabji had never seen anything so wonderful in his life. He had never imagined that a piece of knowledge so wonderful could exist in the universe.
He kept looking at the page thinking: Why have I never heard of this before? Why doesn’t everyone know about this? He sometimes said later how strange it was being at the school, knowing that no one had ever tried to give this glorious piece of information to the boys but instead forced them to spend hours turning perfectly good English poems into atrocious Latin ones. He said the frightening thing was thinking of how many other wonderful things there might be which were kept from them at the school. He had run away one last time and put himself in for A-levels independently and got the As and got into Cambridge, and he had never forgotten the things that were kept from people at school.
I thought suddenly Look. If Kambei had stopped recruiting when the first samurai didn’t work out a 205-minute masterpiece of modern cinema would have been over at minute 32. Five billion people on the planet, I’d tried one. And at least someone who’d run away from school 27 times would not leap to conclusions because I had left school at the age of six.
I was about to get excited and think This is it when I suddenly thought Wait just a minute.
I said to Sib: You know that story about the Ugandan from the Lango tribe
Sib said: Yes
I said: Is it actually true?
Sib said as far as she was aware
I said: But how do you know?
Sib said: Well there was an interview when Dr. Akii-Bua got an honorary degree from Oxford and he said he would not be there to tell the tale without the extraordinary heroism of Dr. Sorabji.
I said: And what about the volcano?
Sib said she had once read an interview of the man with the broken arm describing what it was like falling back into the volcano and then seeing Sorabji climb down inside the rim. She said: Why do you ask. I said I just wondered. I didn’t ask about Pete because I had seen Mathematics the Universal Language myself. Pete called Sorabji that maniac and that lunatic, but he never said Sorabji hadn’t saved his life.
All the evidence suggested that Sorabji was not only brilliant but a genuine hero. The question was whether I really had the nerve to go up to someone who was not only a hero but a scientific genius.