A Time Outside This Time by Amitava Kumar

Author:Amitava Kumar [Kumar, Amitava]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

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VAANI WAS BORN in Ranchi, her father a pilot in the air force and her mother an amateur musician fond of playing the sitar at cultural festivals. All through her childhood, she attended government schools in different parts of India. Then Vaani came to Delhi for her undergraduate studies. Her first teacher was a young PhD named Supriya Nair, a student of E. O. Wilson’s at Harvard and interested in “biopoetics.” Nair was running psychological studies on children at an orphanage in Kalkaji. Her specific interest was in understanding the ways in which classical Indian music affected the brains of children. The head of that department was a different kind of psychologist. He had studied two decades earlier in Chicago, conducting experiments about stressors and dietary changes among rhesus monkeys that happened to be imported from India. The head’s name was Rajinder Bhatia. In Professor Bhatia’s lab in Delhi, Vaani first learned to kill rats. Bhatia’s psychological experiment involved studying aspects of fasting and feeding: he wanted a scientific explanation for overeating and its relation to the availability of food. Did a rat that had not eaten any food for a day eat more and for longer than a rat that had been fed only six hours ago? Did a rat that was given food irregularly develop a desire to store food in its body? Did that rat in any other way demonstrate a new anxiety about food if subjected to such a regimen? What happened if a rat was turned into a diabetic? Bhatia was working on a theory about the poor in India and their eating habits. (He was dead five years later, from a heart attack, while he was walking with his wife from a restaurant. This was a sad event—he was only forty-three years old—but it didn’t stop some students from cruelly remarking that Bhatia should have been studying his own habits of feasting on butter chicken and beer.)

Vaani was on a roster of students who learned to observe and take notes for Bhatia. They monitored the rodents and cleaned their cages. After a group of rats had been used in one set of experiments, Bhatia insisted on using a new group of rats because one of his biggest fears was contamination of data. He didn’t want rats learning from any experience in the lab and acting differently. This meant that Vaani and another student, named Bhushan, were tasked with killing the rats during that whole year. Wearing oversize goggles and masks, the students sedated the animals with a dab of chloroform and then snipped the heads with medical scissors. It was horrible, this exercise, in particular because when the drugged rats felt the scissors closing over their necks, they opened their eyes and turned their bodies rigid. More than once, the poor rat’s blood would spurt onto Vaani’s plastic goggles.

When Vaani shared her woes with Professor Nair, tears falling precariously close to the cup of chai in her hand, her teacher

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