Pt. 2 of 2: A New Way to See Them

Last Sunday night my roommate Arun tracked me down in an internet café. “I’ve come to tell you that we can eat in a restaurant tonight,” he said, really meaning, “I don’t want to cook tonight, and I’ve just gotten my monthly stipend from Seva Mandir.” We located a nearby restaurant with an Urdu name, Ku war Kalewa, and took a seat at a table on the darkened lawn, which fronted an open, canopied structure housing a bar and several tables. No candles were lighted, no external illumination switched on. I had to hold the menu inches from my face to read it. It was my first time eating out since arriving in Udaipur.

In the gloom, stars returned to my brain, and I craned my neck to gaze at the sky. It was no less underwhelming for our murky surroundings. “Do you know anything about astronomy?” I asked Arun.

“Yes?” (“Please repeat yourself,” in Arun’s idiom.)

“Astronomy. Do you know anything about the stars, the constellations?”

“No.” He half-laughed, and I couldn’t decide whether the question seemed ridiculous to him, or whether he hasn’t really understood me after all. I let it drop.

The next morning a FedEx parcel awaited me at work. It had arrived courtesy of some former co-workers and softball teammates who, still basking in the glow of a second-place finish in the Congressional Softball League tournament, had, to my great delight, thought it necessary to ship to India my “29th Annual U.S. Congressional Softball Tournament 2007 Final Four Team” t-shirt, a card, a photo of the runner-up trophy, and several books (the library expands!), no doubt all at the company’s expense. Among the books was a thin and oversized paperback volume with an attractive bluish cover. It was called The Stars: A New Way to See Them by H.A. Rey. The name and the script on the cover were instantly familiar, if not immediately identifiable. Wasn’t H.A. Rey the author of the Curious George books? (I had an intense Curious George phase as a child.) What was the meaning of this book and by what uncanny power had it landed in my lap?

A blank inner page, opposite the Table of Contents, contained an inscription hand-written in blue ink. It began:

Peter,

My hope is that while in India you will have numerous opportunities to lie under a vast, dark sky and marvel at the cosmos. After several years of living in the city, I forget about the beautiful and infinite night sky I loved so much as a child. I forgot about wishing on stars and watching comets glide across the horizon. With so much light pollution the night sky of yesteryear has all but disappeared.

I was stunned. Although impossible, I felt as if a private fancy had been found out. Life’s small serendipities…

I owed this felicity to Barbi Broadus, a co-worker and close friend who had been leveraging delivery of some mysterious gift against future e-mails and correspondence—as in, you’d better stay in touch, or I won’t send you the package. She had served in Peace Corps in a village in the Malian Sahel, where the book had found its way into her hands just as she was confronting the seeming infinity of the African sky (and perhaps the seemingly infinite loneliness of the outsider). The book, first published in 1952, is, as its title implies, a deft and unpretentious introduction to the heavens. Rey reconnected the dots of the constellations in a manner he labeled “Graphic”; this in contrast to the two antecedent schools of representation, Allegorical and Geometric. In essence, he created a new figuration for the constellations, one that rendered them more representational, recognizable, and therefore memorable, all in a quest for greater accessibility and enrichment of our experience of the cosmos. Reading the first few pages, I felt a redoubled enthusiasm. But would I ever have the chance to use it?

The following day I was off to Kotra, seat of the most distant block in which Seva Mandir works, in the isolated, northernmost reaches of Udaipur District, where I was to document the impact of Seva Mandir’s first gravity-flow irrigation project, in a village called Thep. Among my fellow travelers, estimates of Kotra’s distance from Udaipur varied, ranging from 120 kilometers to 185, but the bus ride took more than four hours, and any way you figure it, that’s slow going. And cramped going. And bumpy going. The ride there and back deserves a post of its own (flat tires, an aging woman struck down by a carelessly flung spare, a doddering goat herdsman flogged in passing by our driver, numerous opportunities to calculate precisely how much of one’s butt must remain in contact with a seat to sustain one’s verticality), but I’m afraid it won’t happen, not least because I had an even more interesting jeep ride to Jhadol the morning after returning from Kotra. But I digress.

Seva Mandir’s Kotra office is situated perhaps a half-mile north of town, on a plain that slopes gently to a rocky, brush-lined stream running behind its guest house. Beyond the stream are rolling fields of stony scrub; the fields give way to modest foothills, and the foothills to the lovely forested ridges of an undulating spine of Aravallis. The two-story guest house was constructed in 2005 and seemed resortish in comparison to my accommodations in Udaipur: flush toilets, copious natural light, and a balcony! The guest house was L-shaped, and at the intersection of the L, a spiral staircase led up to the roof, where during the summer months steaming boarders take refuge from the heat and find sleep. It offered a grand view of the surrounding landscape (the second photo in a previous post, “Self-Indulgence and Self-Correction,” was taken from the roof while looking out over the stream) and, I sensed, of an effulgent night sky.

In the evening I sat on the balcony and watched darkness creep into the world. In the last hours of daylight, the stream quickened with activity. People washed clothes and washed themselves; children drove cattle to drink, then stripped down and swam gleefully among their charges; a man waded back and forth, checking his fishing nets. Birds came (a kingfisher, a pair of bee-eaters, and the inevitable crows, pigeons, and sparrows), cackled noisily, and went. As I stared off into the east, the hills grew blue, then gray, and finally black. All the while I ignored the sky, waiting for the true dark of night, when I would steal away to the roof and confront the cosmos on better terms.

After dinner I could wait no longer. It was impossible to avert my gaze from the radiance of the stars; they were immediate and importuning. Among this series of serendipities—the reawakening inspired by “The Dark Side”; the arrival of The Stars: A New Way to See Them; a rooftop perch in dark and desolate Kotra—was a final, tiny one: the night of October 9 welcomed a new moon. Thus it offered ideal stargazing conditions: a cloudless sky unsullied by the fulsome glow of its brightest celestial body. I saw the Milky Way for the first time in memory: it splashed across the center of the sky like a wide and spectral river, rending the empyrean in two. I saw more stars and saw them more clearly than I have at any time since Kilimanjaro. They twinkled and shone and all but spoke, projecting their innate brilliance and vitality across distances greater than the human mind can fathom. The sky wasn’t perfect—the lights of Kotra infringed from the southwest, and the aggregate artificial light of other dispersed human habitations roundabout dimmed the heavens by degrees—but it was more than enough to awe, to inspire “plain old jaw-dropping wonder.” I hadn’t had the foresight to bring the book, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t a night to identify individual constellations, but one to revel in the ecstasy of the glorious totality. I lay on a ledge, arms behind head, staring upward until the cool breeze brought a chill and sent me reluctantly to bed.