I’m sitting in the cafe car of Amtrak NE Regional 82 making its way from New York to Providence. Earlier this morning after a fabulous brunch in Brooklyn (the American breakfast came with a bowl of daal- that’s Brooklyn), I gave Vivian a kiss on the top of her head and told her I’d see her in three days. I took a couple of subways to the new Moynihan Train Hall in mid-town Manhattan and hopped on my Amtrak. Now I am watching the city scape slip by in the distance. The bustle of New York is soon replaced by the coastline of Connecticut. Fall colors on one side. Marshes, small harbors, occasional views of the Atlantic. At this moment the train is rumbling over an ancient bridge that was built by people on the Mayflower.  

I spent the next three days with Alu and Michelle at their lovely home, visiting the beautiful Rhode Island shore, and eating fresh local seafood. It went by quickly. On Monday Alu and I sat upstairs and downstairs nursing our zoom calls. Alu and Michelle dropped me off at Kingston station and I reversed my steps back to Brooklyn in time for supper with Leela and Vivian at the neighborhood taqueria (very good for so far from the border) set between a Colombian piqueteadero and an Ecuadorian coffee shop. The sidewalks were full and Leela seemed to know everyone. Except the fentanyl users sitting on dairy crates across from Wyckoff Heights medical center – the literal ground zero for Covid in the US.

The day before Vivian and I left for Brooklyn, JoEllen and I were at St. Stephen’s for Parents Day. Her English teacher did a close reading of a couple of pages of the Great Gatsby, extracting insights from students like I never got from reading Norah Burke’s Jungle Picture under Ms. Christian’s watchful eye at HPS. In Physics, the students paired up to do an experiment to determine the coefficient to static friction (we probably did this in a couple of grades before in India). For history, the students discussed the claim “Economic crises make fascist government more likely” in the lead up to WW II but a highly relevant topic today. In the math class, the teacher rolled 60 six-sided dice and removed all the sixes. He asked student to formulate and solve an equation for how many tries it would take on average to have just one dice left. The students joined in groups of 3 or 4 and searched for an equation and solved it (in this case, solve for n where 60 x (5/6)ⁿ   =  1). The teacher kept up with the dice and plotted his results after each try. An overhead camera showed his experiments next to an online graph of his results. It took him 23 tries. The theoretical average is between 21 and 22, which the students computed about the time the teacher was done. Not bad. Then in Chemistry they placed samples of salts in a Bunsen flame and recorded the color of the flame. They were given Planck’s equation and his constant and the approximate wavelength of different colors of light. Vivian and her friend observed strontium chloride’s flame and calculated the energy of a single photon of the brilliant red light emitted to be equal to  2.97 x 10^-19 J. Then they had to explain the basis behind Planck’s quanta and the experiment. I was duly impressed. We were doing far more complex experiments in Mr. John Mathai’s chemistry lab in our 11th grade. But we were rarely tying it back to advanced theory like this. 

The atmosphere was relaxed. The kids had all handed in big projects the evening before. Parent’s day is a compressed half a day class schedule followed by a long weekend. Students and staff would be back on campus on Tuesday. Everyone was exchanging holiday and travel plans. When Vivian was asked what she was doing, she said “I’m going to visit my cousin in New York”. Which caused my left eyebrow to rise by a millimeter but I didn’t question it. We skipped school lunch because we needed to pack and get to the airport. On the way to the airport I asked Vivian about the cousin bit. She said – “ok, next time you can explain that I am going to visit my dad’s childhood friend’s daughter”. Jo and I agreed that “cousin” was a very good substitute.

So next morning when we met Praveen and Leela for breakfast in Brooklyn at the place with the daal, I told them how Vivian had made Leela her cousin for purposes of explaining her travel. Leela said “Oh – I’ve been telling my friends for the last week that my cousin is coming to visit”. 

Indian cousins.