Last week I submitted the documents for changing my visa status from a student. The process was far more bureaucratic than the emotional aspect I attached to it – printing paper after paper, getting the certificates in order and ensuring that my address in Kanji characters is accurate.
The immigration office in Sendai is located some distance away from the city centre. One has to take a bus from in front of the Richmond Hotel Premier and wait until the mechanical voice announces the arrival of ‘Haranomachi Icchome’. From the bus stop one has to trace back the road for about five minutes and then turn left into a small building that handles all visa applications. I have often found myself wondering how the insignificant physicality of the immigration office finds itself at odds with the work it does. It is probably one place in all of Sendai that gets to hear the least Japanese. It is almost always filled with befuddled international residents like me who try to find an iota of space in the labyrinth that is the Japanese bureaucracy.
It isn’t the papers that trouble me much. My father enjoys arranging papers in a precise order within his brown envelopes marked with his unmistakably elegant handwriting with blue ink. I have grown up seeing them. A lot of my childhood was spent sitting on the bed with my books while my father arranged paper after paper with his staplers and punching machines – a stellar archiver of Kafkaesque bureaucracy – akin to the Germans with whom he has worked now for over a decade. It isn't the papers, but the cogitabund journey leading to them that occupies my mind. I cannot help but think of the sheer volume of bureaucracy often presenting itself at the precipice of great change.
***
When I first came to Japan in the autumn of 2014, I was 16. It was a weeklong trip to Shin-Yokohama and Tokyo coupled with a homestay in Higashi Murayama in western Tokyo. During my homestay, I still remember learning the basics of tea ceremony at the Musashino High School where I was visiting for a couple days and was first introduced to my adolescent love – the Japanese Wagashi sweets. My favourite memory however has to be my attempt at sneaking an octopus leg in my bag hoping to take it as a present for my family back in India only to be discovered by my shocked host mother who probably now equates Indians with octopuses.
I did not know what to expect from Japan. On the JAL flight from Delhi, the only Japanese movie that had English subtitles was this teenage romance called ‘Say I Love You’ which became representative of all romance in Japan in my head. The only experience with Sushi was the one Sushi set I bought from Foodland in Mumbai for some 900 rupees and tried making cucumber rolls at home. Believe me, it is still the most expensive cucumber dish I have ever eaten. I did not grow up on Manga as a significant portion of my childhood was spent reading Enid Blyton, Edith Nesbit, Jules Verne and an abridged version of Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. Japan for me was as mysterious a land as it was to Portuguese Jesuits in the 17th Century although my faith in Jesus or any divine entity was never as strong.
However, Japan presented herself as a place I aspired to be in. There are the usual suspects such as punctual trains and safe alleys but what attracted my teenage-self the most was the balance that a metropolis like Tokyo has maintained between tradition and technological advancement. The respect for one’s own tongue coupled with the power to express oneself uniquely echoed with my long-suppressed concern about the hegemony of English in Indian society. By 2014, Narendra Modi took over as India’s 15th Prime Minister and held the reins of a falling government providing hope to millions like me that a new dawn is on the horizon. I saw a certain reflection of a new India in the streets of Tokyo. Over the years, my fantasy of this new dawn faded into horror and oblivion in the wake of many social atrocities but my love and admiration for Tokyo as a city built from the ashes of the Second World War stayed intact.
Of the many merits of international education, the one that is least mentioned is the impact one has when they look at their home from a distance. The ‘India Shining’ story is often the one that we all grow up with. The history textbooks end with our tryst with destiny. The country is presented to the youth as the aura of a Shah Rukh Khan-starrer – open arms ready to embrace all with love. Yet, it is the distance that adds nuance to our nostalgia. India no longer appears as a romance shot on a 35 mm film – an important realisation that bridges dreams and reality. The role of gender and caste becomes evermore visible and one finds themselves as a minority in a distant society. It is this form of minoritisation that brings us face-to-face with social challenges, leading us to empathise with the lesser-privileged.
An unexpected result of moving to a foreign land at such a young age was that I stopped thinking from the perspective of a ‘citizen’ of a ‘nation-state’. India to me is a land that I was born in but the country to me rests in the cologne of my father and the clinking of my mother’s bangles. With over a decade abroad, India exists only in my memories, much like my favourite film from childhood – the 1988 animated film ‘The Land Before Time’. I am no longer able to differentiate between a country I was born in and a country like the United Kingdom about which I have only read about in books. It is therefore difficult for me to defend a land with every cell in my body whose existence is merely in my memories – a rather unreliable source. The locus of my identity thus, rests within the people closest to me, a realisation that made me believe that a place is never about the land and is always about the people.
***
One of the earliest films my parents recommended to me were Spielberg’s ‘Jaws’ and Cameron’s ‘Titanic’. My father printed historical details of the Titanic and spiral bound them. There was one file for the ‘New 7 Wonders of the World’ when they were announced in 2007. My favourite however was a green file that was titled simply ‘Trishit Banerjee and the Universe’. I used to go through The Times of India every day to cut out any news about space and add it to that file. The growing curiosity culminated in our family taking an annual day-trip to the Nehru Planetarium in Worli, Mumbai preceded by a sumptuous lunch at ‘Jewel of India’. Apparently I was a notorious kid who would eat all the marrow out of Paya bones before bringing them to the table. I do not remember pleading guilty to my crimes but have been duly acquitted of these charges over the years.
The rendezvous with space at an early age led to me deciding my future career plan – an Astronaut. However, my weakened eyesight and a refusal to swim brought these plans down with a thud. It was followed by a desire to be an Archaeologist following my short-lived romance with Jurassic Park. The hot desert conditions in reality meant that I gave up on those plans rather soon. Finally, I settled on being a scientist after reading a book on the Nobel Laureates of Indian origin. The sketches of Raman, Chandrashekhar and Khorana kickstarted my long dream of being a scientist. I wouldn’t perform my first independent scientific experiment until high school though. Until then, I saw algae under my home microscope and dissected a cockroach with my father, much to my mother’s chagrin. To be honest, I never read any science fiction either. It was only in 2022 that I saw my first Star Wars film at my roommate’s request. Teenage years saw me reading Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, M J Akbar, Sarojini Naidu, William Makepeace Thackeray and, rather regrettably, Shobhaa De. I also made it a point to attempt reading in regional languages which introduced me to the stunning ‘Ek Hota Carver’ by Veena Gavankar and ‘Radheya’ by Ranjit Desai, both in Marathi.
My fascination with reading meant that I spent almost every single day in the school library cataloguing books. I attempted reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as a 12year old and failed miserably. The books in the school library had pink cards attached to the back cover listing the names of all those who borrowed it. I attempted Caesar for nearly half a dozen times but never attained the comprehensive success that I wished for. By the time I reached Class 10, I was faced with the impossible choice of whether to choose English Literature or Chemistry. The sharp division of subjects in high school meant that pursuing interdisciplinary interests always presented itself with its own set of impossibilities. As much as I was fascinated with Bohr’s Periodic Table and the red paperback version of Halliday and Resnick’s ‘Fundamentals of Physics’, I found Khushwant Singh’s ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ and Kamala Das’ ‘My Mother at Sixty- six’ equally irresistible. Putting a stretched definition of Occam’s razor in action, I arrived at the solution – It is far easier to continue to write while studying Chemistry than the other way round. I have never looked back since then.
***
Summer holidays in India came in the months of April and May. For the first few months after I moved to Japan, I refused to believe that the months of July and August could qualify as summer. Back in India, my friends travelled to their hometown to meet their extended families. In my family though, we travelled to the mountains. One of the most memorable trips we took was to Shimla and Manali where we drove down from Delhi for some 15 hours after the now-defunct Jagson Airlines cancelled our scheduled flights. It was in Shimla that my father arranged for us to visit the Indian Institute of Advanced Study whose building used to be the Viceregal Lodge in 19th Century colonial India, followed by its usage as a summer retreat for the President post-independence. That was the first time I was introduced to the term ‘PhD’.
Another summer memory that I cherish is from my time as a student journalist for the now-defunct newspaper DNA YA!. My father and I did a feature together on the local Pani-Puri seller right from the preparation of tamarind chutney to the topping of Sev. It was also during this time that we wrote at length about the neighbourhood Ambarnath Shiva Temple which, it turned out, was built in the 11th Century. It was indeed one of the early mentions of the temple in mainstream print journalism, now a monument of national importance, born out of a father and son discovering their love for telling stories.
As a child though, when we didn’t travel as much, my mother would teach me the basics of Hindustani Classical Music. A singer in her own right, Ma would take her harmonium and we would sit right between the only bed and wooden wardrobe in our humble house as I practiced the bandish ‘Dhana Dhana Murata’ in Raga Bhairav. She would tell me her love for Raga Bageshri and stories of her and my grandfather performing theatre together. It also led me to have an amateur career on stage where I have played distinguished roles of a King, a corrupt Bengali police officer speaking a Bangladeshi dialect and a five minute role of the Hindu God Brahma where my only job was to pass the Veena from my wife Saraswati to the divine sage Narada Muni. It was during this that Ma would highlight how a lot of Indian Classical Music is about what happens between the notes than the notes themselves. Much before I was introduced to the concept of ‘reading between the lines’, I was introduced to ‘reading between the notes’. I would emulate Ma to the best of my abilities. During the run up to the annual Durga Pujo, I would accompany her for rehearsal as she sang traditional verses from Chandipath, several of which feature in ‘Mahisasuramardini’ – the legendary 1931 programme of All India Radio narrated by Birendra Krishna Bhadra which is still played by Bengalis at the dawn break of Mahalaya – the annual autumnal event where devotees on land invite the Goddess to descend to Earth.
Summer in Japan though was different. Other than a few trips to Nagasaki and Ehime in the south, I spent most of my time interning at my laboratory. I would religiously reach the lab at 9 in the morning and would spend days growing my bacteria so as to get the desired protein from them. In 2017, when I first started interning, my professor Dr. Kamagata sat me down one afternoon and asked me if I was interested in working with protein Cas9. At that time, to be completely honest, I had no idea what it was and the potential it held. I didn’t say no however and took it as a challenge to teach myself.
Over the next few weeks I read as many review papers as possible. These papers detail the advancements in a field over a longer period of time and can thus appear closer to a textbook format. For beginners, these papers are a bible. It helps one to understand how a lot of the work we know today was done and developed by researchers in the past. It also is a humbling experience that democratises science as it places the focus on the collective efforts of students and academics rather than the glory of a certain individual. After a month or so, I was clear about what I was looking at and what I wanted to do.
Cas9 is a gene-editing protein. Think of it as a scissors for your DNA and just like any pair of scissors, it can be programmed to cut at any specific place in DNA as we would like it to. While bacteria and some other microbes use it for self-defence, we humans found a way to treat genetic disorders where we can simply cut the diseased portion of a DNA. However, this protein is large, makes mistakes and is rather slow to move. My work, starting from my internship up to my PhD was simply to see how such proteins move and how we can make them move faster.
There are two major types of experiments in my field – ensemble and single-molecule. The former is characterised by measuring a certain property in large quantities which means that all individual characteristics of the molecules get averaged out given the volume. The latter however measures these individual characteristics. We literally stare into a microscope and observe each single molecule. It provides a richer perspective as it adds layers to what could be otherwise a superficial conclusion. My lab and my work focussed solely on this latter method. While they provide novel insights, single-molecule experiments can often be frustrating as success is scarce and reproducing the same results rather rare. In my first year of PhD, I spent the entire 12 months looking into a microscope in a darkened room searching for meaningful data without any success. For those who pursue the dream of a doctoral degree, this is a common experience.
With time running out and looking at your peers race ahead in their respective careers, PhD makes one thing absolutely clear – it is a test of patience and perseverance. It isn’t a necessary degree per se considering a conventional career path in our society and the evaluation can be subjective at times. A PhD is hardly earned by grades and credits and rather asks the pursuer the central question – does your work open new doors or add new perspectives in your field? It pushes the boundaries of the philosophical understanding of a subject and is thus, aptly named.
My PhD experience has been fulfilling. I enjoyed every bit of it and on bad days, you would find me sitting across a counter at Oyaji, my favourite Izakaya restaurant in Sendai’s Honcho, sipping a cup of Hakurakusei and discussing with the stranger next to me the many ways one can clean and prepare a Sea Pineapple. While my love for the research topic and a healthy lab environment had central roles to play in shaping my experience, it was also the realisation of how science connects to society that helped in finding the locus of my purpose.
A major non-academic activity that I was involved in during the entirety of my PhD was my work in the reconstruction of coastal Fukushima post-2011 nuclear disaster. It was in early 2020 that I met Yamane-san, a Tokyo-native who went on to commit his life and work to the town of Futaba where he currently resides with his wife and 3 daughters. It was with him that we developed walking tours in Futaba which led to 2 of my other friends committing to the region in various capacities. A major change for me was during the COVID-19 pandemic when the Japanese government decided to release diluted treated water from the crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean. There was an uproar worldwide even though the reasons were more political than scientific. The release of diluted treated water into seas/oceans isn’t unheard of and is practiced by many countries globally as a standard procedure. The risk to marine ecosystems and the effect to life on land and water was also thoroughly considered. However, communication seemed to be a challenge. The Pacific Islanders, for example, were not convinced of the safety as the source of information was largely the Japanese government and not related experts. The experts struggled and continue to struggle in communicating such critical information to the public without jargon. The already-ongoing pandemic further strained the trust of the public over scientists as the media reported unverified information as science. Up until this point, my association with Fukushima was purely out of love for democratising the urban planning process, a largely unheard experience especially when you come from Mumbai and its suburbs. However, the pandemic helped reorient the axis of my purpose. While I enjoyed science, I refused to be bound by the solitary conditions it can often present. I wanted to work in an environment that was made not only by scientists and strive to be a bridge between science and society.
One way to interpret ensemble and single-molecule experiments is by seeing them in the context of our society. The country, as a unit, is similar to what one would describe as the conditions of an ensemble experiment. Democracy, in practice and without proper institutions, can represent only an averaged opinion of the millions of people within it. However, the framework of the nation-state is rather new. The land that is inhabited by the people, existed long before the first nation-state was formed. It is the individuals who came together to organise themselves that led to the formation of communities, societies, civilisations and nations. Therefore, to understand the various layers of a nation, it is imperative that we understand the people who form its heart – a ‘sonderous’ practice. This is what I came to define as a single-molecular approach to the understanding of our society. With the erosion of a national spirit within me as I moved to Japan as a teenager, I became interested in the communities and society that are in my immediate surroundings. To be able to work with them and cause incremental micro-impact stopped being alien to me and I started seeing them exactly as I would see the results of engineering my proteins at a single-molecule level to move faster. Given that science is a product of philosophy, Futaba helped me realise the many ways I could connect science back to the philosophy it was born from. The scientific method of identifying a problem, hypothesising, experimentation and conclusion is far more common than we give it credit for. The obtaining of a PhD surely is an important milestone for a career in academia but the skillset learnt during the process has wider applications. To be able to identify them and create new perspectives of seeing our world, I believe, is another crucial application of a doctoral degree.
***
One way I remember home is through food. A usual dinner by Ma would have a large portion of rice to be eaten in three parts. The first part would include warm rice mixed with a spoon of Ghee and salt or served with spiced skins of bottle gourd. A lot of modern Bengali cuisine was developed during the famine years, manufactured by the British especially around the World Wars which led to most parts of a tree or a vegetable being consumed. The second part would be Dal which would sometimes be served with fish head or gourds cooked with prawns or assorted vegetable fritters. The final part would be Rohu or a Catla fish curry, followed by a sweetened tomato chutney before ending with a sweet. A weekday dinner would almost always have freshwater fish as a main. During weekends, Ma would cook Biryani that she learnt while we lived for a while in Indore or an Anglo-Indian mutton curry which requires the meat to be marinated in spices and alcohol for around a week. Being in Mumbai also meant that there was a time when we used to get Goan Pork sausages for Sunday breakfast, cook Bombay duck or buy Puran Poli with spicy Dal for an afternoon meal. My father is an absolute lover of Mediterranean, especially Lebanese cuisine and would also insist that his vanilla ice cream should always be served with hot chocolate sauce.
When I came to Sendai, I was disappointed with the Indian cuisine available here. There is always Naan that is served with Butter Chicken and if one is fortunate to get hold of Rotis, it would petrify almost instantly. To the Japanese, this is the daily Indian cuisine. I don’t blame them though. For a long time, all I could imagine of Japanese food was Sushi. The problem lies in the dull and plodding experience at these Indian restaurants that stem from their complacency of little to no competition. Therefore, at some point I took it on myself to invite friends from time to time at my house and cook daily Indian food as a course meal. I have won over many friends with humble servings of Aloo Sheddo (Mashed potatoes with onions, chillies and mustard oil), Chingri Malai Curry (Prawns cooked in coconut milk), Mochar Ghonto (Banana blossoms with prawns) and even Shinni (A religious sweet dish made from flour, coconut, banana, nuts and camphor). Each dish has a certain memory of eating with my family back at home and this was the only patriotism I put into practice.
Over the years in Japan, I have come to appreciate food even more. The Japanese are particular about each ingredient and their origin which is a constant source of excitement for my curious self. Moreover, cooking is chemistry in practice which taught me about various temperatures, textures and taste buds that operate in a symphony to create that experience inside our mouths. It is also a prayer, an act of faith. Eating, to me, is a practice in trust as it is one of the rare things that we put inside our own bodies and become one with. It requires us to use all our senses in truly experiencing it. Therefore, my memory of love and the way I express it always finds its roots in food.
One of the usual questions I get is what kind of job I would be doing in Fukushima after I graduate this summer. There are some usual answers that I always talk about such as using tourism to invite new people and businesses in the region and targeting the Indian market. However, deep down, I also want to tell the story of Fukushima through food. It is heart-breaking to see people, both Japanese and otherwise, refusing to buy any food products from Fukushima citing unfounded safety concerns. Moreover, the lack of a history in fine dining and gastronomic experiences in towns affected by the nuclear disaster also means lesser instances of creative usage of ingredients. To me, the long-held love by the residents of these towns towards their home inspite of being forcefully evacuated from it overnight is akin to making a bowl of Miso or Soy sauce. To love, is to ferment. It takes time and one holds on to the sincere hope of a delicious product at the end. If there is anything I would ever like to challenge during my time here, is to tell the story of Fukushima through fermentation and find a way to be allowed to express my love for this region, with food, all over again.
***
I remember the director Anurag Kashyap saying in an interview that dividing a movie into chapters helps tell longer and complex stories in a shorter time without breaking the flow. An elegant application of breaking a story into chapters that stayed with me is Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘The Home and the World’. The asterisks that divide these paragraphs perform a similar function. They help bind the many strings of thoughts I pondered over as I prepared the documents for my visa. The volume of bureaucracy indeed presented itself at the precipice of great change. As I take my next significant step in my career, I couldn’t help but attempt to tie these strings into a neat ball of yarn. My failings are visible through the literary lint spread over these some 4,000 words.
It is summer here in Sendai. Arundhati Roy would describe it as ‘brooding’ just like Ayemenem in the opening of ‘The God of Small Things’ or Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘sticky August evening’ in the opening of ‘The Namesake’. I take my time looking at the many pictures of Bandhgala that Ma sent me for my graduation ceremony. My final presentation/defence is a week away. The choices I have made in the last decade don’t exactly align with vox populi but there is a contentment that they are my own. There may be regrets when I saunter into the autumn of my life but I would at least not be worn down by the burden of being mundane. Until then, I would keep reading between the notes and chasing the many asterisks.
Sendai, 29 July, 2024
Comments