Chaos Theory--------pan macmillan
Sunita and Mukesh are friends. He’s cynical, from Calcutta, cocky and well-read.
She’s clever, curious and amused by him.
It’s
the 1960s, Delhi University. Fashionable movies play at the art deco
cinemas, Nehruvian poshness is stylish, The Beatles are the rage.
They
meet over a quotation game involving William Shakespeare and whisky.
They both realize there’s something special here. They have burning
questions, as young people do, about things literary, philosophical,
existential, romantic. The answers lie in an endless set of
conversations with Sunita over Scotch, Mukesh imagines.
Till she
thinks America will be the answer, and leaves for a PhD in her search.
He follows her. What happens, over the next forty years, is a journey –
to carry on that conversation. Across continents, campuses, decades,
marriages and life. To find what it is they really want to say.
Chaos Theory, as loosely defined in particle physics, talks of two
particles that circle around each other but never connect, which exactly
describes Sunita and Mukesh’s situation. Their uncertainties translate
into an immigrants’ story of intellectual survival. In this exploration
of missed connections between the abstract theories of modern physics
with the equally abstract emotions of an aging pair of irreverent
professors, comic and tragic mix in a search for comfort which remains,
at best, ephemeral and fragile