''Diaries of a Maverick Professor''

Chopra said good by with a heavy heart, when he moved out of our house the day of my flight.  He was living there with me all the month of July, working mostly on the Barnstable project.  He was quiet and not much trouble.  I had agreed him doing some of the cooking, but no real fancy Indian stuff.  He was doing most of that when I was out of the house.  But had to let me do the cooking European style, when I was preparing it for us.  He had only one request: that every day he had to eat rice, at least once.  It didn’t matter in what form or taste, he just had to eat it everyday.  I was convinced that it was some sort of religious conviction, but we never discussed it in depth.

It was inconceivable to me how little social interaction he required.  For days at end he did nothing but  measure the spot elevations with the parallax bar.  It seemed, as if it was his entertainment.  Occasionally he was humming some tune totally unfamiliar to me; I never interrupted him, never inquired about its meaning, or its origin.  Setting up his stereo model became quite routine after the first week; only at some occasions had he trouble with it, in which case, after a while, reluctantly he asked for some help.  He seemed to be perfectly satisfied culturally.  In the evenings we were watching TV, whenever there was a good old movie; he also liked Westerns.

I was trying to inquire about his family, without much success.  He said he came from a town some 100 miles from Bangalore; applied for a scholarship after high school, and got it.  So he came to Canada, to Frederickton, to the UNB, where he enrolled in the Surveying Engineering program.  I knew about that program from its director: Gotfried Konecny who did his doctorate at Ohio State.  It was he who suggested, (back at the time, when I was looking for an institution to do graduate work,) to go to Ohio State instead of Frederickton, because there were more possibilities there.  He was right.  And I did.

At one of the weekends, an acquaintance and friend of ours, Teri, a young Hungarian woman called me up from her home in Westford.  While talking about my situation, with Chopra sharing my solitude, she suggested that she should invite some of her women colleagues and we should have a picnic and a party after that in their back yard.  She made it very clear that Chopra was invited too.  I expressed some anxiety about the cultural gap that seemed to exist between him and the rest of us.  But Teri thought nothing of it.  So we agreed that I will bring him along the coming Saturday.

After the introductions I passed him along to the girls.  They had some soft music playing, (Teri was very captivated by melodic tunes, regardless of their era, and quite often sought out my suggestions in this regard) it turned out that Chopra was familiar with a number of Gilbert and Sullivan arias and tunes.  It was ‘Buttercup’ from H.M.S. Pinafore that dominated the evening; evidently Chopra knew a great number of them, from high school plays at home in that Town not far from Bangalore.  He was in fact singing them.

He became the hit of the party.  One of the girls was dancing with him almost all night long.  I was going to leave well before midnight, (I needed sleep!) but I was told to go home, never mind Chopra, he is having a good time...etc. and that he will be given a ride Sunday to our house.  Chopra indeed showed up Sunday afternoon, while I had a ‘swim’ in our little backyard pool.  I could hardly recognize him.  He was dreamy, still humming some tunes, ‘The Wandering Minstrel’ from The Mikado.

I was sure he had more to drink last night than I ever saw him having.