Contact - Carl Sagan [87]
Ellie found herself riveted on Sukhavati's appearance: her huge black eyes, erect bearing, and yet another magnificent sari. She thought to herself, I'm not graceful. Usually she found herself able to continue her part of a conversation while mentally addressing other matters as well. But today she had trouble following one line of thought, never mind two. While they were discussing the merits of the several opinions on whether to build the Machine, in her mind's eye she returned to Devi's image from the Aryan invasion of India 3,500 years ago: a war between two peoples, each of whom claimed victory, each of whom patriotically exaggerated the historical accounts. Ultimately, the story is transformed into a war of the gods. "Our" side, of course, is good. The other side, of course, is evil. She imagined the goateed, spade-tailed, cloven-hoofed Devil of the West evolving by slow evolutionary steps over thousands of years from some Hindu antecedent who, for all Ellie knew, had the head of an elephant and was painted blue.
"Baruda's Trojan Horse-maybe it's not a completely foolish idea," she found herself saying. "But I don't see that we have any choice, as Xi said. They can be here in twenty-some-odd years if they want to." They arrived at a monumental arch in the Roman style surmounted by a heroic, indeed apotheotic, statue of Napoleon as chariot driver. From the long view, from an extraterrestrial perspective, how pathetic this posturing was. They rested on a nearby bench, their long shadows cast over a bed of flowers planted in the colors of the French Republic.
Ellie longed to discuss her own emotional predicament, but that might have political overtones. It would, at the very least, be indiscreet. She did not know Sukhavati very well. Instead she encouraged her companion to speak about her personal life. Sukhavati acquiesced readily enough.
She had been born to a Brahman but unprosperous family with matriarchal proclivities in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Matriarchal households were still common all over South India. She matriculated at Banares Hindu University. At medical school in England she had met and fallen deeply in love with Surindar Ghosh, a fellow medical student. But Surindar was a harijan, an untouchable, of a caste so loathed that the mere sight of them was held by orthodox Brahmans to be polluting. Surindar's ancestors had been forced to live a nocturnal existence, like bats and owls. Her family threatened to disown her if they married. Her father declared that he had no daughter who would consider such a union. If she married Ghosh, he would mourn her as though she were dead. She married him anyway. "We were too much in love," she said. "I really had no choice." Within the year, he died from septicemia acquired while performing an autopsy under inadequate supervision.
Instead of reconciling her to her family, however, Surindar's death accomplished the opposite, and after receiving her medical degree, Devi decided to remain in England. She discovered a natural affinity for molecular biology and considered it an effortless continuation of her medical studies. She soon found she had real talent in this meticulous discipline. Knowledge of nucleic acid replication led her to work on the origin of life, and that in turn led her to consider life on other planets.
"You could say that my scientific career has been a sequence of free