The Lunar Sublime (Arjun Mahey

The Lunar Sublime

In 1969 I had been unwillingly deposited by my parents at a small parochial boarding school in Poona, a former military outpost four hours by car from Bombay. It is difficult to find Poona on a World Map, but it has this claim to fame: a large number of British military officers retired there during the high noon of the Raj. The Agatha Christie kind of retired officers, that is, usually of the middle ranks. It was a dreadful school. For the two years I spent there I was beaten up regularly by anyone I disagreed with, which happened often, especially by a manic young lad who later joined the Mossad and was responsible for the rescue of Israeli passengers abandoned to Idi Amin’s murderous whims at Entebbe Airport (or so I heard). I would like to think he cut his thrash-andrun teeth on me.

My only refuge - quite apart from the army band which I joined and drummed for, as an escape from the atrocious regimen of militarized violence such as only boys can inflict on each other - was the world of the imagination, explored largely through books and daydreaming. I was about to turn 11.

The real world and the fantasy (or fantastical) world of the imagination generally decline, then as now, to blend together; but in the summer of 1969 they took one of those magnificent, unreal leaps into the unimaginable, and managed to concoct a scenario out of my fondest immaterial dreams into the ungiving material world. I read about it on the way to dinner, or what passed for dinner, in the newspaper clipping that the seniors would post daily in the Refectory corridor. Man was going to land on the Moon.

For an 11 year-old boy with a rich internal life, this was a mad, implausible, and perfect miracle. A human being on the moon? The most that had happened was dozens of people going around the earth and moon in an endless succession of circular flights. It had become worse than boring; it had become commonplace and dull. This was different; this was the substance that imagination makes whole tapestries and castles and cities out of; the stuff that allows a young boy to imagine the mundane become fantastical, like bringing the dead to life, or making waterfalls flow upwards. I was doused in breathless wonder.

I kept a scrapbook of the journey (long lost) from liftoff to touchdown and back (with my own drawings, and such photographs I could manage to squirrel away in those distant days of no television) and was magicked clean out of the world for all of July and much of August. I fell in love with the sciences, remaining scientifically minded ever since, and was transformed within a year from dunderhead to mathematical wizard, later going on to become the best mathematician in school.

Needless to add I read as much as I could about it: anything, everything I could get hold of in a provincial town on the wrong side of the western coastal hills. What made it