The Big Picture

By Anna G. Raman

The rain had been pouring down since that morning. The sun that often lit up everything was hiding away and dark clouds hovered over. Even if it had been sunny, it wouldn’t have made any difference to the atmosphere in the lab where Maya sat staring at her computer screen. She had checked her program about twenty times, re-compiled and re-ran with the same result – it kept crashing. Every two minutes, her eyes would shift the gaze to the tiny corner of the screen to look at the time. She had an hour to go. Dr. Wolfe had made it very clear that the email had to be time-stamped by noon on Saturday for the report to be acceptable. There was tension and anxiety. Maya leaned over slightly to pick up the box of Ritz on her desk. She usually loved to munch them when she was at her desk. Somehow, today, they were distasteful. Dennis got up to leave and remarked on his way out, ‘Don’t spend all your life here Maya…and good luck with that assignment you have’. He was a Ph.D. student and also worked unusual hours, like Maya. Unlike Maya, however, he was married and had three children. ‘How does he do it?’ she wondered. Her gaze then fell upon the chair next to that of Dennis. That belonged to Hui, who was the only one in the lab to have regular working hours. He never worked after 6 p.m. and never came in on week-ends. ‘Must be extremely smart”, she said to herself. His wife was a Ph.D. student as well, and worked for Dr. Marvel, who owned the most funded projects in the entire department. Maya wondered what Hui and Ya did on the weekends. ‘Come on now Ya, all that home-work can wait for sometime’, Hui would say and pull her into his arms…Maya realized her thoughts had strayed, along not-very-decent lines, and waved her arm attempting to shoo them. She would never be married. Marriage presented too many challenges, in just getting two minds to agree upon things…She remembered ‘maladjusted misfits’ from ‘Rear window’. How could they be happy then? Immediately, she thought of her Mom - how she missed the stories her Mom used to tell her at bed-time. ‘Oh! Grow-up now’, she chided herself and returned to her notes. She must check the equations, something must be wrong there. With her head resting on her hand, which in turn rested on the desk, she got immersed in the variables and numbers on paper.

Maya had figured it out. She made the necessary changes to her program and then, it worked! She pulled the results into a file hurriedly and emailed them off. But she had to confirm they had been really sent, so she opened her ‘Sent’ folder. ‘Oh Noooo!, I’m late’, she almost screamed. The time-stamp showed forty five minutes past noon. She had been so involved with the problem-solving on paper that she had forgotten to check the time. All the hard-work and all the effort would go in vain…She had to do something. Of course, if she explained to Dr. Wolfe, he would understand. After all, he had coerced her into taking four graduate courses, which she had felt she couldn’t handle for sure. Maya quickly printed out the results and driving directions and soon, she was in her car driving off. The house was an hour’s drive from the campus and she had to hurry. There were too many people on the roads. Perhaps there was a football game that day. As soon as she was out of the campus, traffic eased and she felt herself speeding and driving past lights just as they turned red. The gloom of the sky and lack of sleep made them appear orange, in fact. ‘Not so red after all, how did colors end up getting all their meanings? And whoever gave stoplights those colors…’, she mused.

Dr. Wolfe’s residence was very much set apart from the neighboring houses. She parked on the road and walked up the stone steps, which she had never seen before, only read about in books. There were too many tall trees over-shadowing the house and they imparted sinisterness to the atmosphere around the house. She could hear sounds of hammering coming from the rear of the house. ‘That must be him, in his workshop’, she said to herself. Carpentry was one of his hobbies. She reached the upper end of the path and walked through the open fence gate and around to the back where she hoped to find Dr. Wolfe. The door to the workshop was slightly ajar. The moment she stepped inside, she heard his dog bark. Almost at the same time, the alarms went off. Maya was so shocked, she didn’t watch her step. She stumbled over something and fell, unconscious. She heard sirens before her senses shut down completely.

Maya opened her eyes and stared at the blue sky. Her mind felt rested and at ease. She turned to look at the grade card beneath the lamp on the bed-side table. She had gotten a ‘B’ in Dr. Wolfe’s course that semester – the only ‘B’ which seemed to poke at her, out of the card. But it didn’t really bother her. She had made the right decision and taken an ‘I’ (incomplete) grade for his course for that semester. Four courses and teaching work for two labs had been too much. She regretted that she hadn’t trusted her own instincts. The work-load had been very high and her life had gotten chaotic after the middle of the semester when she had so much to do, and so little time for other things, even sleep. She hadn’t finished that jinxed assignment on-time for Dr. Wolfe’s class. She had dozed off that rainy day. There was always a constant drone from the computers in the lab, which could soothe anyone to sleep. Dennis had awoken her when he returned from lunch at about 4 p.m. Some of the stress had left her when Dr. Khan waived her final exam for the Linear Algebra class; the take home exam for the Math class had been straight-forward. A week after all her finals, she had completed that assignment – it had been some really silly error. She had just needed some relaxation – may be some meditation, sleep or perhaps a movie. But how could Maya have done any of those without a sense of guilt - she belonged to the hard-working women class, always striving for perfection.

Maya had to be up soon to fax a copy of the grade card to her future employer, who didn’t really care for her grades, just wanted a copy for their records, and then drive to Dr. Wolfe’s house, for a farewell lunch. She thought of the stone path, the sound of alarms and sirens in her silly dream and laughed out loud. It was strange that the stone path had seemed so unfamiliar in that dream. Why, there wasn’t a single temple back home without stone paths, stone steps and stone sculptures. Out the window, the sky was so blue and beautiful in spite of a few gray clouds here and there – just like a big picture that had always hung on that wall, unnoticed until now.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Anna G. Raman's work has appeared in The Guindy Times (Chennai, India), Poetidings and recently on The Mindful Parent website and is forthcoming in The DuPage Valley Review and other journals.