The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [10]
They usually met for lunch in the students’ dining hall as soon as their morning classes were over. Unfortunately none of their classes were shared. Given Gamini’s father-inspired emphasis on government and law, that had been pretty much inevitable.
When they didn’t have time to go into the city proper, there was nearly as much fun to be had exploring the campus of the university itself. Early on they found a penetrable service entrance to the school of medicine’s faculty lounge. That was a promising target, with platters of goodies always laid out, along with endless supplies of (nonalcoholic) drinks. Unfortunately, it was—permanently, it seemed—out of the boys’ reach; the faculty lounge was almost always full of faculty. It was Gamini who found the ventilation louvers for the girls’ changing room in the school of education’s gym—and Gamini who made the most use of them, leaving Ranjit somewhat puzzled. And at a not quite finished, apparently abandoned structure attached to the Queens Road building they found a treasure. According to the decaying signage it had been intended to be the school of indigenous law, set up during one of the periods when the government had been extending olive branches not only to Tamils but to Muslims, Christians, and Jews as well.
The structure itself had been nearly completed, with a row of unfurnished faculty offices and classrooms that had barely been begun. The library was much further along. It even had books. According to Gamini, whose father had insisted on his learning simple Arabic at an early age, the authors were such as Hanafi, Maliki, and Hanbali on the side of the room meant for Sunnis, and mostly devoted to Jaafari on the side for the Shia. And in a little alcove between the two sides sat a pair of silent but fully operational computer terminals.
This whole unoccupied structure called out for the boys to take advantage of it. They did. In short time they had discovered a reception room, furnished but not lavishly; the receptionist’s desk was plywood and the chairs ranked against the wall were the foldaway kind usually found in funeral parlors. That wasn’t their most interesting discovery, though. On top of that plywood desk was an American picture magazine, one of the kind devoted to the lives of Hollywood stars, next to an electric kettle bubbling away and a foil-wrapped container of somebody’s lunch.
The boys’ private little den had not been as private as they had thought. But they hadn’t been caught, and they had chuckled to themselves as they hastened to leave.
Exploring this new territory was a delight for Ranjit. Studying at the university, however, wasn’t. By the time he neared the end of his first year, he had learned a good many things, few of which he considered worth the trouble of knowing. Not in the worth-knowing category, in his opinion, was his newfound ability to conjugate most regular French verbs and even to do the same for a few of the most important irregular ones, such as être. On the positive side, though, was the fact that he had somehow eked out a passing grade in his French class anyway, thus helping to preserve his status as a student for another year.
Even the much-disliked biology course became almost interesting when the (equally disliked) instructor ran out of frogs to dissect and then turned from the theoretical discussion of disease vectors to some actual news stories from the Colombo media. The stories were about a fast-spreading new pestilence called chikungunya. The name was a Swahili word meaning “what bends up,” thus describing the stooped-over posture of patients suffering from its ruinous joint pain. The chikungunya virus, it seemed, had been around for some time, but in relatively trivial amounts. Now it was suddenly reemerging, and infecting the region’s always available swarms of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Thousands of people in the Seychelles and other Indian Ocean islands were coming down with rash, fever, and incapacitating joint pain…and, the instructor reminded them, Sri Lanka still possessed countless swamps and stagnant ponds