Spectacle of the Stars: A memory of magic from the night sky
Paromita Patranobish was a 13-year-old on the rooftop in Durgapur when a meteor shower changed her life, birthing a love of stargazing: ‘That night, 22 years ago, I understood the universe as a living, pulsating ecosystem… the Leonid shower had me as a witness to the power of worlds infinitely beyond my finite one.’
1998 was an unremarkable year. The excitement around Titanic had begun to subside and “My Heart Will Go On” had become the insipid unofficial anthem at every music event and birthday party. Auto-tune and EDM in their heyday took away something of the living presence of the human voice from music, replacing it with uncanny intimations of loss and absence. News was suddenly dull as dishwasher; Clinton and Lewinsky were all over the place, but they were of little relevance to the choppy waters of my teenage angst. We young Indians did sense that something of the magnitude of the tests at Pokhran, which in turn gave us the opportunity to outshine each other in demonstrations of nationalist rhetoric, in endless debates with the theme, ‘Nuclear Power: A Boon or A Bane’.
I grew up in Durgapur, this remote subdivision in Bengal, built on the mineral rich valley of the Damodar river. It was the shiny days of post-independence industrialisation, and the prophetic birth of Google went largely unnoticed. In one of the shelves of our small local bookshop—a many-headed hydra that supplied everything from textbooks to shiny Wordsworth Classics paperbacks to new Indian releases—a striking green cover with half submerged lotus leaves in rippling water caught my attention. A devout convent school girl, anything with ‘God’ in the title, even if this God was allegedly ‘of small things’, meant days of haranguing my parents till Arundhati Roy’s book finally rested on my table, right next to neatly brown papered notebooks and stacks of Tinkle comics. The iconic pink water lilies of Sanjeev Saith’s photograph bloomed as promisingly as my curiosity.
Even by the usual stench of our steel manufacturing town, where we habitually breathed air stained with coal dust and sulphur, this new smell of charring was odd, as if the night’s inky scaffolding was on invisible fire, an electrifying miasmic prelude to the sky’s grander pyrotechnics.
My thirteenth birthday came and went leaving a trail of disappointment in its wake. I woke up the day after with throbbing temples and my skin breaking out in painful blisters. Despite what the glamorous Hollywood sitcoms beaming into our living rooms insisted, teenage did not usher in rage, rebellion, and independence packaged in JanSport backpacks and freshly minted MP3 players. Instead, it brought an exceptionally cold autumn and chicken pox. It brought twenty-one days of quarantine and an unbroken proximity with the things that comprised the fabric of my humdrum, middle-class life. And through this proximity came a belated appreciation for the textures of this life’s irreplaceable uniqueness.
I had been tossing and turning on tides of boredom for two weeks when I saw, tucked in a corner of newsprint, some information about a Leonid meteor shower. In the span of five minutes, I had unearthed a portal into a universe more spectacular than anything popular entertainment or nuclear explosions could rival. It had never occurred to me that in the ten odd years I had spent in our building, that the mostly unused sprawling overhead terrace could be turned into a makeshift planetarium for gazing at the night sky. And until the late evening of November 17th when I finally got my parents to agree to let me spend the bitterly cold night under the stars, I had not known the sublime experience created by the weave of stillness, silence, and the ubiquity of the dark.
Armed with binoculars and a thermos filled with piping coffee—a genuine luxury in those times—I trooped to the terrace, alone and feeling decidedly brave to witness the passing of the Tempel-Tuttle comet. The little hamper I had packed for the occasion contained an eiderdown, a portable Sanyo, and leftovers from an unfinished dinner shoved into a steel lunch-box. I perched on the freezing floor of the terrace as the neighbourhood lights went off one by one, not knowing what to expect.
This was my evening of an inverted, improvised nocturnal one-person picnic, and as the night progressed, I was struck by a distinct odour of burning that suffused the surroundings. Even by the usual stench of our steel manufacturing town, where we habitually breathed air stained with coal dust and sulphur, this new smell of charring was odd, as if the night’s inky scaffolding was on invisible fire, an electrifying miasmic prelude to the sky’s grander pyrotechnics.
Durgapur Tower. Photo: Paromita Patranobish
All I knew of the cosmos till that point was what had been handed down in badly illustrated diagrams of the solar system in science textbooks, which made planets appear less the dangerous and gaseous macrocosms they are, and more like cogs in a medieval contraption. Or, I had been presented those outlandish leaps of Spielbergian imagination in films like Close Encounters and ET, both of which pictured ‘outer space’ as an exotic tourist destination, waiting to be colonised by the American consumerist imperium.
But that night, 22 years ago, I understood the universe as a living, pulsating ecosystem that broke apart our conceptual casts and metric grids with the force of its immeasurable physics. The turbulent traversal at unimaginable speeds of a comet through the earth’s atmosphere was translated on the surface of the visible sky, like charged, sparkling bites of a cryptic intergalactic code. We called it shooting stars.
Dozens of them flashed, blazed, and glistened through the sky, leaving bright neon trails, peaking in intensity after midnight as I struggled with a fascination that arrested me in my tracks, and an excitement that pulled me in all directions in an effort to keep pace with the rapidly intermittent streaks of brilliance passing through the night. The coffee in the thermos was untouched and the food had turned cold. I had forgotten the adage of wishing upon falling stars, for the meteors of the Leonid shower that night felt like pieces of an old self, falling away into the abyss.
The memories of my first encounter with the stars came flooding back to me last month, as a new stellium formed in the sky, a once-in-twenty-years meeting of Jupiter and Saturn all through the week of the winter Solstice. That night in 1998, the Leonid shower was one of strange contradictions. In keeping solitary vigil, I had discovered how solitude is the opposite of loneliness, inhabited as it is by countless presences, by a mute yet effervescent order of vibrations, movements, germinations, interactions, beginnings and endings, a conversation below the threshold of our habitual registers, which continues in spite of human witness, and remains unnoticed in the bustle of daily life. In waiting in the dark, I learned how darkness is neither uniform nor opaque, but an invitation to participate in an altered manner of engaging the world, an apprenticeship in a different way of seeing the universal in the immediate, the extraordinary in the mundane, an education in the arts of patient anticipation, careful attention, and curious yielding, which the presence of the unknown and the inscrutable compels in us; in short, a surrender to the invisible that opens up the sonic, tactile, and olfactory dimensions of one’s environment.
Sitting under the vastness of space, I discovered that small town nights are singular experiences, free of pollution, made up of wide open spaces untrammelled by concrete, and peopled with an array of characters: nocturnal golden jackals engaged in howling matches in faraway thickets yet to be ushered into urbanisation’s fold, concerting cicadas camouflaged between the waxy leaves of the sacred fig, a night jar or a startled cuckoo stirring the fabric of silence peremptorily, the colony watchman’s intermittent whistle and baton that dragged and clattered along wrought iron gates, the chugging wheels and piercing sirens of coal bearing wagons in the industries whose twinkling lights and haunting rhythms—muffled yet distinct—were borne across the distance by light tropical breezes. But most of all, that night of the ’98, the Leonid shower had me as a witness to the power of worlds infinitely beyond my finite one. My love of stargazing was born, segueing into a questioning, inquisitive attitude towards knowledge.
At one point that night, a group of older boys from an adjoining house also climbed the terrace. They were the only other audience to the magic up above, friends who seemed to have turned the meteor shower into a sleepover, their silhouettes outlined by flash-lights. With every fiery particle streaking by, they cheered and clapped, arguing about what number it was. I could hear snippets of their conversations breaking the silence from time to time, concerns about homework, science practicals, and the recently-concluded FIFA World Cup. For a brief, but illuminated duration, we were a constellation of stargazers, connected through bodiless conversation, through a shared wonder.
By dawn the next day, Tempel-Tuttle had begun to withdraw, the sparks still fell, but were fewer and of lighter intensity. I was back into the quarantine of my room, cold and disoriented. The pale light over the horizon felt anomalous, an intruder after five hours of intimacy with the dark. The cosmos had shrunk to the confines of my bed.
Yet something had shifted during the night. Perhaps the threshold into teenage that I had sought in vain in books and television arrived in the form of a cosmic metaphor of travel, contact, and friction, of the unexpected beauty that could spark out of resistance and the world that lay beyond our busy footfalls—only if we dared to listen.
***
Paromita Patranobish is an independent researcher based in Delhi, moving between academic and creative interests. She has a PhD on Virginia Woolf, and has taught in SNU, Daulat Ram College and Ambedkar University Delhi. When not teaching or writing, she loves to spend time with her camera and telescope doing amateur photography and stargazing. You can find her on Twitter: @paromita33
