Maya

Maya
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All her life, Maya had felt herself excluded. Excluded because she was from a small town, exluded because she was a woman, excluded because she was westernized. Within her own community she felt excluded from other women because she was considered ‘technical’ and weird. She found their conversation on such inane things as cooking recipes, costume jewelery, parties, boys and men, immensely boring. Within her own, small town community, she could well have been from outer space. Outer space? Now 'that' would be a good place to be.

She had graduated from high school with honor, a national rank and a merit scholarship. She decided that she would have a crack at the entrance examinations of the National Institute of Technology. Most of her friends were getting married and settling down and there was a great deal of parental and peer pressure to do the same.

“ Why don’t you go and help out Preeta with her shopping,” her mother asked. “They would appreciate your help in planning for their wedding. They’re such good friends of the family and your father ‘expects’ you to go and help.”

“That cow,” Maya scowled. “What have I got in common with her?” she asked her mother as she continued to carefully clean the engine of the latest airplane model that she was building.

“She is a human being, not a cow, and a pretty considerate one at that,” her mother retorted. “will you stop competing with everyone and everything, for heaven’s sake?”

“Mama,” Maya paused while she picked up the microchip for her model airplane, “they don’t like me and I don’t like them, the feelings are reciprocated. The sooner I get out of here the better.” Maya held the plane in her hand and did a ballet pirouette on the bed. "I want to fly mama. Higher than the birds and airplanes. I want to fly."

Her mother sighed and slowly walked out of her room. What was she to do with this sweet, gifted, child with a mind of her own? Maya got up and went over to the bookshelf. It was full of books on mathematics, fluid dynamics and aeronautics. Yes, that’s what she wanted to study for her bachelors, aeronautical engineering. And that was how, she decided, she would get out of this rotten place, escape from the viscious gossip, the envy and jealousy of her peers. She didn’t have a single person she could call a real friend.

And as the years went by, she withdrew into herself, into a world of airplane accessories, computer chips, the latest hardware designs and technical magazines. She looked up above the drab brick walls into the clear blue sky. Yes, that’s where she wanted to go. She wanted to fly. Fly over the distant mountains, over the snow capped Himalayas, up and higher than all the feathered souls, into the vast great blue above.

She revelled in competition and she felt alive when she was creating something and doing it ‘better’ than the others. In a deeply religious community, she didn't care much about God and religion and such other things that she considered the ‘opitate of the masses’. She was gifted and she knew it. She had only herself to fall back on. The more she felt excluded, the more she withdrew into a world of her own where she fought with imaginary demons dancing on the swirling dust of imaginary battlefields.

As everyone expected, she studied hard and did better than all her peers, mostly males, at the Institute of Technology.

“A bloody robot,” they called her. “She’s not human, she’s got no emotions at all in that shapely body of hers.”

“That’s not her body, it’s the organic accessory for a flying future spacecraft,” a classmate scowled. “She’s not connected to this world…..the bitch has no feelings.”

Maya was on course with her own objectives. ‘Management by objectives’, that’s how she would manage her life, she decided and with iron determination she went about the job of reaching those objectives. It really didn't matter how many hearts and minds she blew away and threw away in her journey to the sky. Not that it mattered to her. She was alone and as the years went by, she liked being a loner dependent on no one but herself, relying only on her brains and talents.

She was overjoyed when was accepted into the PhD program at MIT. She knew as always, that she would have to work harder than everyone else to meet the same objectives. She accepted the inevitable truth. A truth that the world was divided, that there was an unjust social order, that equality was a dream, that there were boundaries……and that she was equipped to fight, on her own terms.

As she had expected, she found herself ‘excluded’ once again. She was westernized, but she wasn’t Anglosaxon. They respected her work, but fellow researchers found her strange and distant. Somewhere down the highway of achievements, the warmth had been lost. She had disconnected herself from everything that was human. She couldn’t even take a joke thrown at her in a carefree moment. She built a fortress around herself. She kept the world out by an imaginary boundary of logic, reasoning, goals and an increasing ladder of achievements. She knew she had to fly, find herself in the vast blue above. "One day", she was to tell her husband, " a spacecraft will kidnap me".

She was the obvious choice for NASA for their space program and she fitted in beautifully. There was no time here for boring social intercourse, no time for God or mammon. This was another battlefield, a battlefield to win frontiers with her mind and to live in the here and now.

Finally the great day arrived. She received confirmation that she had been selected as a member of the Columbia program, the first team of astronauts on a mission beyond the moon. She couldn’t sleep that night. All that she had worked for, struggled for, was coming her way. She remembered her father telling her, “if you want something badly enough, you’ll get it.” She desperately wanted to get away from this world, this divided, fragile and fragmented world that didn't make sense. Here was her chance of getting away.

The weather was perfect. The lift-off was perfect, and beautiful. As they rose, the onflight camera recorded their perfect progress. First, there was the image of the space center. Then the image of the city. Then came the image of the city as a black and grey spec surrounded by the green of the countryside. It was not a uniform green. There were light greens spliced with deep dark greens. There were the white, black and grays of towns and cities. There was a muddy brown river snaking through the countryside. As they rose further, the entire state became visible to the naked eye. There was a kaliedoscope of colors. As they blasted past the upper reaches of the stratosphere, the entire continent could be seen, floating through clouds, floating serenely on the earth’s surface.

As they went past the moon, Maya looked back once again. And, she was stunned by the breathtaking sight. Something was happening to her. In the distance she saw the intense shimmering blue sphere, veiled in swirling clouds, inlaid with a fretwork of continents, islands, deserts, rivers, mountain ranges, lakes and polar icecaps. She saw it in the background of the very deep black and velvety cosmos, something familiar in the unknown surrounding dark matter, knowing that it was orbiting the sun in a regular predetermined path; and she was profoundly moved.

Something moved inside her heart and mind, stirring in her depths, something mysterious, moving,…. And yes, spiritual. It blew away the armour she had built for herself over all those years, armour that she had created to fight in the battlefields of her mind. She had always looked for the blueness in the skies, and all the while, it was right there, at home.

She suddenly understood the interconnectedness and the purposefulness of the cosmos. She looked at the blue jewel floating in space and realized that it was beyond man’s rational ability to understand, that suddenly there was a non-rational way of understanding that had been beyond her previous experience. For the first time in her life, she had viewed a glimpse of divinity, a little nudge from a mind that was not her own.

And, for the first time in her life she was at peace. At peace with herself, her parents, her community, her co-workers, friends and teachers, all those who had tried to reach out to her. Now she wanted to reach out to them, rebuild the connection of the spirit.

A violent blast shook the spacecraft and brought her back from her reverie. Something had gone wrong. Within moments the spacecraft turned into a huge ball of fire exploding in different directions. Maya found herself drifting above the ball of fire, looking down from above the exploding spacecraft, the expanding strands of fire, free floating in space, free at last to fly away. Free at last. In the distant, she thought she heard a call. The blue planet was calling her back, back to it’s blue bosom. A gentle call to come back and start all over again.

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Post script: This story is loosely based on Kalpana Chawla, crew member of the NASA Columbia spacecraft that exploded in space 16 minutes before reentry into the earth's atmosphere. For the real life story of Kalpana Chawla visit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw0DYq-d7lI